


dark end of the street

by Mad_Max



Series: dark end of the street [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Drug Addiction, Drug Dealing, Drug Use, Explicit Language, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Minor Violence, New York City, graphic drug use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-03-07 23:49:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 20,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3187856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Grantaire makes friends who might actually be good for him, Joly has an incredibly skewed vision of 'health-promoting activities', Enjolras may or may not be planning an actual attack on the government and Courfeyrac's dad really can't understand why he would move out of a gorgeous one-bedroom in Soho to occupy a studio with a broken radiator in Bushwick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I'm always iffy about first person, because what if I get the voice wrong, but rather than go back and edit old fict that I am now embarrassed over I thought I'd just start something new, so here it is. A junkie au.
> 
> Note: Grantaire is irreverent so the writing is irreverent because it's in his voice, but seriously do not do basically anything he does.

Best place to hide out is in the Sbux bathroom in between _remedial algebra_ and art history because they’re always packed and full of tourists and they never send anyone to harass you for the epoch of your life you’ve now devoted to crouching in this shitty public bathroom and  
the people outside have devoted to waiting for you to come back out so they can piss out their 5$ lattes in peace.

Uni bathrooms are always full.  
Someone always has the beer shits.  
It's an inevitability that you’ll walk by at some point and catch a gnarly secondhand high off the smoke dripping up from under the doors.  
Which, come to think of it, is more an excuse to use them than not to.

I hike down to Starbucks because, like, I like coffee ok.  
Sue me.  
I especially like spending more money than I have on shit like coffee  
and chocolate (6$ one bar, on sale, Whole Foods, Dean & Deluca, Chelsea Market)  
and craft beer (15$ pints, brewed in Tim Cotrello’s basement in Brooklyn while his very pregnant twenty-six year old illustrator wife rots tea for homemade kombucha in the kitchen sink, called ‘imports’ because they get shipped across on the IKEA ferry every Sunday so that Jerry, who runs the shithole diner-cum-bar _gastropub_ can save on truck fees)  
(Jerry’s a prick)  
(It’s good stuff)

So I’m in this Sbux bathroom sweating my ass off and sick as a dog.  
It’s November and like fifty degrees out and I’m sweating because I’m dopesick.  
I’m dopesick because I stupidly decided to kick on a whim on a roof in Brooklyn at 6:30 pm on a Wednesday night.

It’s dangerous having a Romantic Soul and a Drinking Problem especially on some dude’s roof in Brooklyn that you know through Jerry, the gastropub prick,  
especially when he says, 'I dated a junkie once and it sucked. You guys are all the same. All you do is like, lie and ask for money and get high.'

And I’m thinking, well it’s not _all_ we do, but then I remember I spent the last four days hanging out with Bossuet because he showed me where he keeps his weed cash once when we were stoned.  
Watching National Geographic docs on TV saying really poignant things like -  
‘Dude.’  
‘ _Dude_.’  
‘ _I know_.’  
Eating all the snack food in his pantry and egging him on about his degree and his roommate and like, but what does he think of _that bill_ they just passed  
you know, the one about the women’s rights and shit?  
And he said, ‘Fuck. It’s so fucked up. Musichetta was _pissed off_.’  
He was so stoned his eyes looked like bloodshot marbles and he kept licking his lips over the Icelandic volcanoes and the uncontacted peoples of central Asia.  
He only had twenty bucks left, and I felt bad, so I left him five.  
Next day he asked me if I remembered how much we smoked, how much we bought, and I said,  
‘Dude, I don’t even think you remember but it was _a fucking lot_.’  
It’s not like I _try_ to be a shitty friend. It just comes naturally.

I had to talk Parnasse into giving me a gram for sixty bucks, which he did because I threw in some sunglasses I had picked up off someone’s desk in algebra a few days before.  
They were some designer that costs too much because it’s _not_ made in China.  
Parnasse digs that shit.  
I was planning on taking the heroin down to Brooklyn with me and slamming it on this dude’s roof while the sun went down, Bright Eyes or something playing softly on an iPhone, centred wide shot of me pushing the plunger and leaning on my haunches with the Brooklyn skyline in the background.  
Wes Anderson style.  
Scenic.

All that considered, he had a point that I couldn’t argue with.  
And it’s not that I need to argue, but I don’t like when other people’s points are better than my points and my whole plan was starting to seem kind of stupid now that he was like, in on it, you know, like I was this trope.  
So I told him to fuck off, and he got offended for some reason.  
So I said sorry, look, it’s a touchy subject. I’m trying to kick.  
(I wasn’t)  
(At the time I thought:  ‘I’ll be dead and grey and blue in the ground before I actively decide to do any such thing, mark my words’)  
But he did that _ooh_ thing and mixed me a drink and spent the rest of the night watching me get shitfaced on cheap premixed margaritas pacing and ranting up and down his roof about the price of sunglasses that aren’t made in China, and he let me sleep on his couch.

Of course I woke up with snot on my face and my hair stuck to my forehead like a fucking idiot.  
I had left my one rig up on the roof, so I went for it, got winded on the stairs.  
The door was locked.  
It was tragic.  
But I remembered there was a guy in my 9 o’clock yoga class who shoots ‘like, only coke, dude, it’s medicinal, I’m pre-med’.  
If there was ever a reason to actually go to a 9 o’clock class, well, it kind of argues for itself.  
Plus yoga’s pretty chill, I thought it might help me feel less like I’d been run over by a semi full of Midwesterners ca. 2010 and more like I’d been run over by a semi full of, I dunno, North Koreans ca. 94 or something.

Long story short, it turns out this guy buys needles in bulk because he’s obsessed with the idea of catching AIDs or Hep C or something _from himself_.  
And he’s like, ‘You shoot coke, too?’  
It’s not like I was about to say no.  
So I’m in the Sbux bathroom at 1:15 pm with sweat tickling my ass cheeks, swearing because my hands are shaking and some asshole is pounding on the door and none of it is conducive to cooking up this fucking shot.  
And the door flings itself open  
and hits the wall with a bang that might have given me permanent hearing damage, jury’s still out on  that one  
and there’s a squeal and I almost drop the shit  
and the girl outside says, ‘I think someone’s doing _drugs_ in there.’

I’m thinking, _fuck_.  
Shaking so hard now it’s a miracle I manage to suck any of it up at all, I should be sainted.  
And the good vein in the upper side of my forearm keeps rolling over the bone like an overzealous puppy.  
I can’t hit the ones in my hands because they’re full of valves.  
I’m wearing these stupid tight jeans because it’s cold and I thought they made me look kind of cool, like a real Ramone and not one of those yuppie wannabes.  
I’m lying, they’re the only jeans I had left that I hadn’t puked on.  
Either way I can’t get to my legs without pulling my pants down.  
Crouching half-naked over the grimy Sbux bathroom tiles like some perverted junkie House Elf.  
Or was that Gollum.  
I hit the fragile-looking vein over my ankle on the first try, instant return, and I can taste it in my mouth.

The girl from outside says, ‘ _Excuse_ me!’  
At that point it’s like, whatever. If she wants the bathroom so bad she can have it.  
I’m halfway back into my jeans, blood on my sock, rig already back in my pocket with the orange cap on for like, just in case.  
She says, ‘ _Excuse me_.’  
Fake Midwestern New Yorkers are the pushiest because they think they have to live up to the stereotypes.

I think I’m drooling a little bit, but it’s good shit, and I feel that great brand of wired and chill and at peace with the world from the first thirty seconds of the speedball winding down to a nice comfy opiate doze, so I give her a friendly nod that might look more like a spasm as I come back out.  
‘Hey.’  
She’s tall and freckled and it’s kind of creepy, like a five year-old boy got stretched out in the Laffy Taffy factory.  
I think I have a class with her.  
I assume it’s art history, because it’s the only one I can remember.  
She says, ‘About fucking time,’ and I give her double thumbs up.  
No time to stop and wonder why of all things I’m giving anyone double thumbs up like some socks-and-Teva wearing TV dad.  
Anyone who says drugs make you look cool has a fucked up definition of the word ‘cool’.  
‘You should stock up on wet wipes or something,’ I say.  
‘What?’  
She’s staring at me like I just told her I ran over her dog with my moped.  
‘Toilet paper here sucks,’ I add helpfully.

It’s that look she gives me, with her eyes blank and her lips a hard line on her weird five year old boy’s face.  
Like I just asked her for a dollar for ‘the bus’.  
Like I’m that guy wandering between the trashcans in McDonalds with stained khakis on that reek of piss.  
It’s a very loaded look. Full of judgment.  
Reminds me of that hot blond kid in remedial algebra who apparently failed out of solidarity with some friend who got accepted from a shitty high school that didn’t offer advanced classes.

On further investigation I reach the conclusion that she might not have understood a single fucking word I was saying.  
This realisation hits me as I go to order the venti mocha latte with whipped cream that I plan on paying for with the six bucks Floreal’s creepy socks-and-Teva wearing TV dad boyfriend gave me ‘for the bus’.  
He works in finance and he’s a total dick.  
Even without the Ethan Allen couch.

‘Venti latte with a shot of mocha and extra whipped cream,’ I say.  
It’s loud. The guy behind the register says, ‘I’m sorry?’  
I repeat: ‘Venti mocha latte, extra cream. Uh, whipped. Cream.’

On a side note: I am definitely drooling ‘two year old’s first tooth’ levels. ‘Grandpa at the strip club’ levels of thick ropey drool.  
I think I can feel it seeping into my t-shirt, but it seems like  a lot of effort to check when I’m already having to put so much work into ordering a 6$ latte.  
I think I might be higher than I thought.  
Another side note: that’s the downside to speedballs sometimes that is also an upside, depending on how you look at it.  
I mean, you could accidentally overdose and not realise it for a minute while you’re still blissfully jacked on coke, and I guess that would be a bummer.

‘Latte,’ I say, and the barista dude looks alarmed. It sounds like ‘laaa-ah’.  
‘Sir?’  
He seems scared.  
I can’t blame him but I wish I could explain that I’m more of a Fang the friendly half-giant’s dog than a flesh-eater or whatever he’s picturing.  
‘Latte,’ I say again and shove the six bucks in quarters at him that Floreal’s banker gave me because Floreal’s banker is a fucking asshole.  
He hands me a filter coffee with room for cream and I do the double thumbs up.

I nod off at the cream and sugar stand and come to again with half-n-half dripping down my shirt.  
Woman behind me sniffs and scurries away fast.  
Can’t remember if I put any cream in my coffee.  
I remember I don’t like cream anyway.  
It occurs to me that banker bro always gives me bus money in quarters because he realises how fucking stupid I would look trying to pay for drugs in pocket change.  
Next time I go to visit, I’ll make sure to spill espresso on the armrest of the white Ethan Allen couch.

I must nod off again on the bench I’ve collapsed into in Union Sq because there’s a pigeon sitting next to me when I come to.  
We eye each other.  
I’m pretty sure it’s judging me, so I tell it to fuck off.  
It doesn’t move, just keeps staring with its creepy orange-eyed pigeon pokerface.  
I’m mildly worried about being shat on and catching some evil fucking pigeon disease.  
Seems like a pretty ironic way to go down, considering I just shot up heroin and cocaine in a dirty public bathroom and have never exactly been Captain Cautious when it comes to needle hygiene.  
I fade out.

It’s too late to go to class by the time I wake up.  
I don’t check my watch, or wear a watch, but I take a wild guess that it’s too late and pass out again.

It’s basically wash rinse repeat ad nauseam from thereon out.  
Second verse same as the first  
but a whole lot longer and a whole lot worse etc etc.  
At some point I am pelted with loose change from a wide-eyed six year-old with pigtails, a fold-up scooter and a harassed-looking nanny on a cellphone.  
She says, ‘There you go!’  
I go for the double thumbs up, which has become my signature move.

A cop wanders over as I’m opening my eyes around six o’clock and says, ‘You can’t sleep here, man.’  
He gets the Move, too, and walks away shaking his head.

By the time I make it back into art history the following Tuesday, Sbux bathroom chick has moved her seat a few rows back, closer to mine.  
She gives me a look that I think is supposed to be significant, and I should probably wave or something, but I’m nursing the hangover from hell and think it might not go down too well if I puke on her after exposing her to my unwashed underwear and seedy drug habits the week before.  
‘Did you just give me a thumbs up?’ she says.  
‘Double,’ I groan, because, like, it’s important to maintain the Signature aspect of a Signature Move.  
The screech of her desk legs across the linoleum floor actually curdles the acid and leftover pizza swirling around in my stomach, and I think out loud that I might puke on her for real.  
‘Gross,’ she says.

Cocaine Kid was mia in yoga.  
I had actually forced myself out of bed early hoping we could bond over his giving me something to pick-me-up again for free.  
That’s the problem with drug addicts is they’re completely unreliable, especially when you need them.  
Parnasse won’t pick up my calls until he gets back the $16.62 I owe him from Sunday.  
(If he doesn’t get it back soon, he might do worse than ignore me, which is something to keep in mind next time I go to blow thirty bucks on dinner for one at Mancora)

Basically I am stuck in this hellish state of perma-hungover, nauseous and sweating and blinking a lot because the words on the board keep falling letter-by-letter out of line  
and the last thing I am prepared to do is play twenty questions with Sbux chick, who can’t quite mask the unmistakable edge of construction and unrealised dreams in her accent that screams ‘Camden, Ohio’ when she asks me ‘like, were you seriously _doing drugs_ in the _Starbucks bathroom_?’  
Give me a break.  
I’m like, ‘Chipotle makes you use a code,’ and she stares at me, pigeon-style.

‘That’s really gross, you know,’ she says, ‘like, do you know how many people go in there before they clean it?’  
‘I have an abcess on my left asscheek from skin popping,’ I tell her, ‘and I found that needle on a park bench.’  
She pushes her chair back with an even louder screech than before and looks stricken.  
‘But you could _catch something_ ,’ she whispers, and looks me up and down for good measure, I think, as if to find the little tag protruding from my skin that says ‘Handmade in Brooklyn, 100% Bullshit, 10% Hepatitis, Machine Wash or Not At All’.  
I go, ‘I figure if you catch the same thing twice, it cancels itself out,’ and am just about to put my head down and get some desperately needed sleep now that my alcohol withdrawal induced heat stroke has been replaced by sweaty chills when I tack on in a fit of incredibly creative inspiration:  
‘Can I get your number?’

Needless to say, I don’t get her number.  
I do get a handful of impressively passionate glares that remind me of commie Adonis from Algebra.  
Bossuet says he knows him from International Politics, and they’re starting a club.  
Commie Adonis and I probably have really incompatible ideas of what makes a good after school hangout.  
I might go anyway. My favourite bar doesn’t open until after six.  
Plus I have to see if Bossuet can lend me the $16.62 I need to pay back Montparnasse before he sends one of his sketchy gang friends after me to ‘collect’.  
It would be really, utterly lame to lose a toe or something over less than twenty bucks.  
That settles it then, really.  
Workers Unite against the top-hat-wearing-champagne-popping 1% and all that; I might even hit up the library, brush up on my Marx/Engels -  
when I shift to put my head back down, I can hear the little pharmacy bag in my pocket crinkling, and shoved into the side of my left shoe, the bulge of what survived a delightfully debauched weekend with Jerry-the-Gastroprick’s 10%-per-volume homebrew and the bundle I scored off Parnasse that may or may not have cost me a toe -  
on second thought, I might skip the library altogether and duck out to Starbucks instead.

  



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The meeting, an introduction to several more Amis (with plenty to come!)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who left feedback/kudos. It is so much appreciated!

Commie Adonis’s real name is Enjolras.  
Not that I care.  
I get this from Bossuet, who came to bum a smoke and was surprised to see me in class.  
‘Thought you’d be in bed until at least five after last night,’ he says.  
This reminds me that I’m hungover. And homeless.  
‘Speaking of beds, dude,’ I say.

  
I can stay for two weeks on his couch if I

  1. go to this socialist circle jerk after school club with him so he can be assured that at least one person there is really cool

  2. promise to shower at least once a week, to brush my teeth daily if I drink milk from the carton

  3. help pay for weed

  4. promise not to shoot up in his apartment




Which-  
‘What the fuck kind of a rule is that?’  
‘My house my rules, Grantaire. Last time you left that shit lying around and I had to tell my super I was babysitting a diabetic cat.’  
‘So I’ll get you a cat.’  
‘Nothing intravenous in my apartment.’  
‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’  
‘Snort it, I don’t care?’  
‘Bossuet, _bro_ ,’ I have to stop and stare in disbelief, ‘exactly how middle class do you think I am?’

 

We reach a compromise about the fire escape in exchange for my tossing in an _ironic_ lucky rabbit’s foot and another Parliament.  
‘Please don’t call them P-Funks ever again,’ I say.

 

Now we have that settled, I’m hoping we’ll have time to skip down to Sbux or something before this meeting so I can ‘take a shit’.  
Bossuet says, ‘Don’t bullshit me.’  
‘ _Bullshit_ you? Bossuet, man, _bro_ \- I couldn’t bullshit you if I tried. How do you even bullshit a guy who bullshits himself so well he still thinks it’s appropriate to go out in public wearing Happy Bunny at the age of twenty-three? I don’t want to bullshit you. I swear down, man, _I have to go_.’  
He looks at me like he can x-ray his way into my bowels and see that I have really been painfully constipated for four + days.  
‘Do you even - ‘  
‘ _Oh my god_ , dude, like, _every day_.’    
‘Swear?’  
‘ _Bossuet_.’  
‘I mean it, man. These guys aren’t like that. You can’t just come into this political meeting all ‘party hard and balls to the walls’ - ’  
‘First off, no one says ‘balls to the walls’ unironically anymore.’

 

It’s embarrassing that I even have to explain this.  
Typical, like.  
‘They do if they star in a Johnny Knoxville movie,’ Bossuet says.  
‘Ok, but dude, consider this - you don’t have a soul patch or wear backwards hats. You are literally wearing a t-shirt you bought in a mall in Yonkers when you still had braces and -’  
‘Point?’

 

The point is that heroin is not a party drug.  
You don’t go balls to the walls when you go overboard, you go chin to chest on a planter in front of McDonald’s at 9 am.  
Drool on yourself.  
Nod out.  
Try to give the ‘concerned citizens’ who stop to see if you’re having some kind of fucked up slow-motion epileptic fit a thumbs up and end up falling face first into the sidewalk.  
When you come out of it a bit, you realise you’ve been holding in a fart that betrays you.  
Possibly shouldn’t have popped all that dulcolax on your way out.  
(You wanted to take a dump, you always want to shit but usually the fantasy includes a toilet bowl and clean pants)  
You seriously debate with yourself whether it’s worth going in and trying to use the coupon you found in the subway to get a free medium fry without the ‘buy one get -’ half of the bargain  
but decide against it, not because you’d have to waddle in like a two year-old in a cloth diaper  
but because you can’t find the coupon in your pocket  
and you’re not allowed inside this particular McDonald’s anyway for getting drunk at a back table and turning it into a makeshift stage where you performed slam poetry to an audience of sniggering teenagers until the manager was called to threaten you with the police and physically removed you from the premises after you called him a ‘McCunt’.  
Which wasn’t even original.

 

‘There is no point.’  
There’s no bathroom line either.  
‘See you in five, buddy,’ I say, and give him the double thumbs up.

 

We’re late to the meeting and it’s my fault.  
‘Just go inside, please,’ Bossuet says.  
He gives me this look that is all eyebrow and curled lip and the matching narrowed  ‘if I didn’t know better than to get my hopes up I’d be so disappointed in you’ eyes.  
I’m like comfy functional high and enjoying the little gust of warm air that reached out to envelope us as we opened the door, so I couldn’t care less.  
‘ _Okaay, dude_ ,’ I say cheerfully.

 

Of course the collegecommie After School Special takes place at a cafe.  
(With $1 coffees it’s something of an anomaly topped only by McDonald’s because they do burgers too)  
It has the dull, worn-down ‘AA Meeting room’ aesthetic with the brown floor and the pinboard walls full of flyers for  
‘roommate needed, $850 a month + internet, no smokers or pets’  
‘FOR SALE: this bike’  
‘FOR FREE: my couch, come and get it before the bedbugs do!’  
‘COUNSELLING: Low-cost services, we work on a sliding scale!’  
Bossuet takes out his phone to tap something into the cracked screen and frowns.  
I’m thinking, if this thing turns out to be some ‘12 steps to Justice’ campaign I’m gonna need more than this shitty dope to get me through it.

 

Cocaine Kid says loudly into my ear, ‘You going to this thing too?’ and I jump onto his foot on instinct.  
Speak of the devil, and you’ll step on his tail or whatever.  
‘Fuck, dude, you fucking scared me.’  
Cocaine Kid sniffs and wipes his nose on a Kleenex.  
‘You look wrecked,’ he says in greeting.  
‘Hangover.’  
‘I know a good cure for that!’

 

The good cure for that is cocaine  
( I fully approve)  
which he doses out like actual medicine in the button bags they put injacket pockets at Macy’s.  
Four of them, they’re individually labelled and lined up on a back table in a separate room  
where the AA aesthetic has been kicked up to new extremes  
with brown carpeting and an A/C unit hanging crookedly from the window.  
Framed posters on the wall immortalising the history of Alcoholics Anonymous  
and handbooks printed out in the 50’s  
details like large sticker letters spelling out buzzwords like ‘HOPE’ and ‘STRENGTH’  
and the Serenity Prayer on a cloth banner in a place of honour at the centre.

 

He’s cutting lines on the table with his school ID for Bossuet and me.  
Firing through his monologue on IV hygiene and ‘the actual benefits of IV use over snorting, I swear’  
typical.  
‘I have a system for it all. It’s even numbers, or multiples of nine. Numbers have such a big influence on the magnetic waves, you know? Even numbers are chiller than odd. Odd are imbalanced, except for nine, which has three equal sets of three. My theory is you have to mix it up. What it’s cut with. Some of it’s not water soluble, so I have to label it for filtration - ’  
‘Should we - ’ says Bossuet.  
‘Oh, we’re fine back here. They rented the room out, so no one will bother us. I mean, Enjolras doesn’t _like it_ ,’  
Commie Adonis refuses to look our way  
‘but he’s all about personal freedoms, and this is _medicinal_. There are _actual health benefits_. I have this theory that even artificially inducing a higher heart rate can improve your cardiovascular health if you do it in a controlled way. It’s like exercise without exercise.’

 

‘I am _all about_ exercise without exercise,’ I say.  
Bossuet, snorting a line off the ‘sterilised’ back of an anatomy textbook: ‘Whatever I can do for my  heart, you know?’

 

Coke has a Lazy Susan effect on our conversation.  
If you closed your eyes you could probably imagine yourself spinning between frenetic monologues,  
broken off sentences bleeding one into the other  
not the slurred drone of the alcoholic equivalent  
but a steady current of narcissistic bleating and interjections like, ‘you know, eh, right, eh, kno’d’a’mean?’

 

I’m vaguely aware of further activity in the background, the entrance of new people, a heated discussion and something paper-y is torn up and shoved down a decorative candle holder.  
None of it interests me as much as what I have to say.

 

‘It just doesn’t _do anything_. I mean it’s the Twelve Steps to a new addiction. It’s like housewives breaking out in cold sweats when they miss an episode of _Days Of Our Lives_. Like, where’s the meaning of life? Sure, dude, you go to meetings, but do you _live_ , can you even function? What happens when your Higher Power gets pissed off because you keep a poster of Bowie over your bed, and he’s like ‘remember that thing I said about worshipping _idols_ ’, and it’s like, well if you want to be an idol so bad, dude, maybe you should have got into glam rock instead of -’

 

‘So I bought these magnetic beads that you string around your headboard,’ Cocaine Kid says, ‘because sleep is when your body is most receptive to magnetic energy. I’ve been reading these studies from Colorado. They’re really into magnetic energy there. It’s all even numbers, the beads. This energy pulses through your body in the night helping your organs spruce themselves up and keeping your brain active; it’s totally regenerative. I feel, like, a million times better since I did that and re-aligned the bed with the magnetic poles. And my skin is _amazing_ -’

 

‘Her name is Musichetta. She might be the love of my life, but she keeps playing that hot-and-cold with me. She’s _so gorgeous_ and _so cool_ -’

 

‘And it’s not even fun. What’s the point of devoting your life to something if you can’t have a good time while you’re at it? I mean, not that life’s a walk in the park with George or whatever, but if you’re gonna spend the morning in tears because the Rite Aid cashier was sketching you out so you panicked and bought fucking _Cookie Crisp_ instead of Lucky Charms, you should at least have a better way to blow off all that excess steam than sit around in a circle holding hands and asking for the strength to just accept the fact that you are now stuck with possibly the shittiest excuse for a cereal in the entire genre of cereal. They don’t even _taste like cookies_. They don’t even taste good drunk. Five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration, man, you are literally _stuck_ with them until you eat them all, so you might as well have a drink -’

 

‘The thing about probiotics is you have to take them every day at the exact same time. I love them, though. They’ve saved me from so many colds -’

 

‘How did Cookie Crisp survive for over a decade when Oreo O’s got discontinued after like, a week? Is there even a God? Is he even capable? By the way, bro, what is your _actual name_?’

 

Cocaine Kid is checking his tongue for fungal infections in the reflection from his phone screen.  
‘Jolllly,’ he says thickly.  
‘Your name is Jolly?’  
I’m thinking, fat old white guy in a red hat.  
‘ _Joly_. Like _Angelina Jolie_ but with a ‘y’.’

 

‘I like it with more ‘l’s,’ says Bossuet. Midway through wiping his nose, he pronounces ‘l’s like ‘ills’.  
‘I have all the ills,’ Joly agrees.  
Bossuet’s laugh is scratchy and raw.  
‘Jolllly of the many ills!’  
‘Does this look inflamed to you?’

 

The meeting around us is winding down.  
Clusters of two-and-three branching out to find new company.  
Almost like an AA shindig.  
People you don’t know nervously asking if you’d like to exchange numbers, get together sometime, stay in contact.  
I absently take one down from some guy with a Sesame Street name, Maury or Marius or whatever.  
‘ _Yeah, man, cool, man. Yeah, man, bro, hit me up sometime, totally_.’  
I’m thinking, never.  
The only reason I pay my phone bill is to get _that call_.  
Marius looks like the most thrilling thing he’s ever purchased in his life was a multi-pack of Pixie Stix.  
He’d still be wearing garanimals if they sold them in his size.  
He opens his mouth to say goodbye and I’m legitimately concerned for a second he might burst into song, or tears.  
Suddenly worried,  
where the fuck am I?  
‘Yeah, _see you around, Maurice_.’

 

Commie Adonis is still sitting in the furthest corner.  
The furrowed brow, the round cherub’s lips, he’s discussing something serious.  
I know his serious from algebra, which he usually spends doing his work because he cares  
or talking about things that are not algebra.  
Two party systems and congressional control and power to the people, right on, man, etc etc  
Not my kind of serious, but it’s hot.  
It’s the coke that authors that thought.

 

‘This is Jean Prouvaire,’ yells Joly from across the table.  
I swing around too fast and almost fall off my chair,  
and my heart is pounding out some funky ‘Deutschland-in-91’ techno beat from the last line.  
Prouvaire bends over the anatomy textbook and then back up, coughs,  
and powder falls out of his nose.  
He catches it in his hand, licks it off, which is respectably gnarly, and says, ‘You’re in my class.’ in a thick accent that is ‘not Australian’.    
‘He’s from South Africa!’  
‘Jo’burg,’ says Prouvaire, ironically shy for a guy in plaid pants.  
Working that exchange student vibe  
with the mismatched outfit and the soft Knowing Smile that says  
‘the legal drinking age back home is 16 and my parents let me have beer or wine with dinner in middle school’.

 

When I was 16 we had an exchange pair of siblings from Israel.  
My parents had tried to ship me off as their part of the bargain, but I failed admission into the program for having a ‘criminal record’  
having been caught shoplifting at Macy’s,  
silver earrings down my socks,  
silk ties down my pants,  
wearing new shoes I was planning on taking off outside the store.  
My sneakers were out front in a Duane Reade bag in a trashcan.  
The plan was to grab as much as I could get my grimy paws on, fish my shoes back out, stick everything in my backpack and hit up this pawn shop in the Heights for quick cash.  
Sell everything way beneath its value, buy vodka with my fake ID and pills from this guy in the Bronx with a lazy eye and rat named Two-Bit.  
Having succeeded with that: tell them I was going ‘camping’ with Bossuet.  
They’d have given me community service if I knew when to shut my mouth.  
Instead I projectile vomited Wild Turkey and Totino’s pizza rolls in court.  
Bummer.  
Remanded into custody in an attempt to ‘teach this kid a lesson’ for my parent’s sake more than mine.  
And the foreign exchange group said, ‘Sorry, but we have a strict behaviour policy. We just can’t be responsible for your son.’

 

The two that we got barely looked like siblings.  
Yitzakh, the brother, was a total geek.  
Glasses and extended study hours in my father’s office, the works.  
His sister Leah was chill and tall, with a supermodel’s mouth and a lot of skill for shoplifting wine and prying open third-story bathroom windows from the firescape.  
My parents would gladly have adopted Yitzakh if it meant they could somehow retroactively abort me, I was sure of it.  
I spent a lot of time listening at their door with fire-engine red eyes from blazing up with Leah in our shared bathroom.  
Swearing I could hear my name in every second syllable, I would burst in eventually, wild-eyed and barely able to yell through the cotton mouth, ‘ _I fucking know you want to send me away_!’

 

There were late night cop calls to the house and failed drug tests.  
Leah and Yitzakh had to finish the rest of their stay with a family on the UES, and our name was blacklisted from future participation.  
(‘Do you ever stop and think about what this is doing to your parents?’ my therapist asked.  
‘ _Dude, I didn’t even sign up for this Hug-a-Stranger exchange bullshit_!’  
‘This is that personal responsibility thing we were talking about, Zechariah.’)

 

Prouvaire looks like more of a Leah than a Yitzakh, bent over the anatomy textbook again, his plaid pants with the striped shirt and the eager edge to his voice when he starts discussing the taxidermied squirrels he just bought at a yard sale upstate.  
I decide instantly that I like him for it.  
I like more that he’s willing to answer my Cunningly Disguised inquiries about Commie Adonis as we split a cab home.

 

‘Enjolras? ,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘I wouldn't say he's a square, no. What's a square, really? He doesn't take drugs, but he's on something else. He's on another plane mentally. Enjolras is focused. But more importantly, he's a good person. He's got a pure heart. Everything that he is is pure, and what he isn’t, he purely isn’t. The boy is a blery force of nature. He’s the tempest and the eye of the storm at once. ‘Beautiful and terrible’, or ‘charming and terrible’, take your pick.’  
Prouvaire laughs and pauses to lick the papers together on the fat blunt he's been rolling.  
Something about the way the light hits it through the dirty cab window, the blur from my eyes with the coke and the heavy stop and go of the cab makes it seem too thick in his hands.  
I hate weed.  
He presses the last corner down, pauses to observe his handiwork.  
The cab lurches and I feel nauseous.  
‘Is this you?’ says Bossuet.  
He is pointedly not looking at me, and I’m not complaining.

 

The building we pull up to has an unrelated twin in Chelsea.  
I know because I used to have a connection that lived in the dilapidated house down the way that didn’t seem like it belonged between Whole Foods and the Fashion High School on 24th.  
‘Run by the sisters of the Sacred Heart’ type of thing, or whatever.  
Affordable housing for foreign students.

 

‘I'll see you in Art History, Grantaire,' Prouvaire says.  
Another meaningful look.  
He tucks the blunt behind his ear and slides out of the idling cab.

 

My nausea is churning.  
Fucking sick again.  
Hot flashes and a runny nose that might have been from the coke.  
I might not be sick. It’s still early.  
But I might be.  
Bossuet lets us in without a word, which could be a sign that he's about to have a rough comedown  
extra depressive etc etc,  
but I'm now 98% sure that I’m sick again and stuck with this shitty dope until further notice (i.e. I have money) so I care less than I should.  
His eyes follow the trail of my hand into my backpack where my kit lies safely nestled between torn layers of vinyl lining.  
No judgment ever from Bossuet,  
which is enablingly convenient and uncomfortable all at once.

 

'You gonna be on the balcony, then?'  
'Fuck,' I say.  
My voice is grating, like the vocal chords have rusted over from this postnasal drip,  
and Outside has that greyish ‘freeze your ass off’ look about it that makes me wish I owned one of those Norwegian fisherman’s overall sets or something.  
Or a jacket.  
(The exhausting contradiction of heroin addiction:  
you’re always looking for something to sell so you can score more dope or better dope than the shit you already bought, or to stock up for the case of an apocalypse,  
which means you barely make it home before deciding that methadone or subs would make for better stockpiling and your dealer said ‘tropicana is _fire shit_ ’,  
and you’re more than willing to forget that everything your dealer sells you is ‘fucking fire’ on the off chance that this time he was right,  
and it might have been totally worth it to pawn off your winter coat for 15$.  
You can always go out and overdraw your account at TJ Maxx when you’re high,  
but once you’re fiending again it all seems clearer,  
it’s 32 degrees out with a wind chill of 29 and you have no jacket and no money and no more dope,  
and you could kick your own freezing ass if your foot would reach  
if only because it pisses you off that you don’t have your jacket still on you to sell.)

 

‘Maybe I should stay inside with you instead,’ I say. ‘No offence, bro, but you’ve looked better. Livelier, you know?’  
(At some point I started saying bro _totally ironically_ , but it’s reached the point of compulsion; no sentence sounds complete without it, and I’m stuck walking around like an eternal fratboy.)  
‘You just don’t want to go out in the cold,’ Bossuet says.  
He falls heavily into the couch and stays there a second, staring at the blank TV screen like it’s his favourite show.  
‘What happened to your jacket?’  
I let myself fall in next to him.  
‘Can you lend me 20 bucks?’  
‘No, and I say that with love.’  
‘You say that cause you’re broke.’

 

He sighs and adds, ‘Please tell me you did not take it to that place in the Heights that ripped you off for your laptop.’  
If my life choices were a theme on Wheel of Fortune, Bossuet would totally win.  
‘Where’s your roommate?’  
He’s possibly caught off guard.  
‘Bahorel? Out, I don’t know. Don’t change the subject, I want to know what you got for it.’  
‘Enough,’ I say evasively.  
‘Fifty?’  
‘Dude, it’s _secondhand_. There’s like seven years worth of pit sweat in there.’  
‘Thirty?’ His eyebrows knit themselves together beneath his prematurely receding hairline. ‘What’d you do, give it to him for ten bucks?’  
‘ _Fifteen_ , bro, _fifteen_. I’m not pathetic.’  
Bossuet frowns, shakes his head, starts to roll a cigarette and stops.  
‘You sold a six hundred dollar jacket for fifteen bucks?’

 

I could remind him about the six hundred dollar TV that blew when he forgot to unplug it during a hurricane.  
The small inheritance he squandered when we were nineteen and thought ‘living well’ meant drinking top shelf whiskey and wearing bathrobes and slippers in a double bedroom at Holiday Inn.  
_Your hairline is receding_ , I want to say,  
but the smallest part of me that loves the shit out of this bastard with his thinning hair and his cigarettes that taste like an actual fart settles for shrugging.

 

‘You act like I wouldn’t sell my soul to the devil for a dollar if I was one short.’  
‘What’s with your thing for Enjolras?’ he says suddenly.  
My palms are sweating, but my back feels cold.  
_Chilly chilly it’s evening time_  
‘What thing? What do you mean?’  
I’m sick and I need the fucking bathroom.  
He stares at me, the ‘I know your bowels are blocked, Grantaire’ stare with the creepy fucking x-ray vision that is probably mostly a side effect of twelve long years of friendship,  
but I had made him wear sunglasses on an acid trip when we were twenty;  
(‘ _Don’t look at me with your fucking Cyclops eyes, man_!’  
‘Dude, you are tripping balls.’  
‘Block your beams, bro, block your fucking beams!’  
It turned out later I hadn’t actually said any of it out loud.)

   
‘You can do it in the bathroom,’ he says.  
He sounds so tired and defeated about it, I’m almost sorry.  
Almost.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I shamelessly live for feedback, seriously guys, don't be shy, even if it's like 'ur fict sucks'.

The TV is flashing from the wrong angle when I wake up.  
Bright against the heavy clouds outside, blaring with colours like exploded Skittles.  
(I have theories about the purposefully obnoxiously oversaturated use of colour on TV  
how they’re always trying to sell you something  
that’s becoming less and less concrete and less attainable  
this Teletubby life in full Technicolor,  
which doesn’t exist,  
depressingly,  
but that’s a rant for another time.)  
There’s something vaguely disturbing about Huggies commercials on a Saturday morning.

 

(As a teenager I had recurring nightmares of my skin chipping off like old paint as cracks appeared in the walls of our bright colour-coordinated family bathroom, where it always turned out that all the colour and the sunlight and the soft edges were a fading varnish supplied by my mind to cover up the ugly dystopian tunnel-like place we were really living in and that the family therapist called  
‘feelings that we might want to explore about your relationships to your parents and friends’.  
‘I think I just need to stop smoking weed,’ I said.  
‘Well, I can’t argue with that.’)

 

Bahorel is on the couch above my head eating Poptarts, ‘Dude, you reek.’  
I’m putting a herculean amount of effort into not puking on his Captain America socks.  
It’s easier if I lay on my side.  
He chews open-mouthed, ‘I don't know what your babysitter told you, but if you’re gonna stay here, you have to bathe.’  
Getting the acid reflux burps that taste like hot dog and shampoo.  
Somewhere in this hellhole of an apartment is a bathroom with a working toilet.  
‘You gonna be sick?’ like he’s only vaguely curious.  
I lose the battle and bathe his feet Mary Magdalene style in greasy hair and stomach acid.  
‘Can I borrow twenty bucks?’ I ask.

 

The bathroom floor is like 2.5x less comfortable than the living room rug.  
Bonus points, though, for lack of cable TV.  
I’d like to think my stomach is starting to settle in lieu of the noise and dizzying brightness.  
‘Even if I had twenty bucks to give you,’ Bahorel is running the hot water for a shower and pantomiming picking up the shampoo and washing his hair, for my educational benefit.  
‘Apart from the fact that you just puked on my favourite socks, I can think of fifty thousand more interesting ways to spend my money than on your three ring circus.’

 

As soon as Bahorel leaves, I have to resort to Plan Z.  
I can see him settling back in on the couch for another stimulating episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians as I army crawl through the doorway.  
His bare feet are bouncing to some spastic rhythm a world apart from the commercial jingles he has blaring at top volume.  
I’m propped up on my elbows and belly trying not to draw attention to myself as I reach my backpack.  
Dragging it by the cigarette-burned straps back into the bathroom, where the hot shower steam has made the air thick and fogged up the mirror  
‘the better to see you with, my dear’  
and I can hear Bossuet shuffling into the kitchen from his bedroom.  
Bahorel’s voice loud and poptart-thick over protestations that ‘he puked on my favourite socks.’  
‘Why the hell would you put your feet near his mouth?’  
I close the door, reducing them to a muffled buzz.

 

First order of business is to pull everything out and squint at it,  
scraping at anything that looks even vaguely like powder.  
I’m running my fingers over the bathroom tiles to make sure nothing is passed over when Bossuet pounds on the door to see if I’m ‘still alive’.  
‘Fuck off, dude!’  
‘Get in the shower!’  
There’s an old filter floating around in the debris of pencil shavings and crumpled paper at the bottom that I briefly consider sucking on before deciding that I am not that desperate.  
(I am.)  
Apart from this one small mercy, the backpack is so useless to me that I could set it on fire,  
or cry,  
and I’m thinking up creative curses for all the assholes who tell stories about finding fucking pellets on their bathroom floors or actual bags in the backs of bedroom drawers in their time of need,  
wondering why the hell god never came through for _me_ ,  
why do bad things always happen to _good people_ , etc etc,  
the typical junkie pity party.

 

Montparnasse sends all my calls straight to voicemail, asshole.  
There’s nothing else left to do, I keep telling myself, the UN defines family as a natural and _fundamental_ group in society,  
and funds are exactly what I need and precisely what I lack.  
My mom picks up on the first try.

 

‘Zechariah? Is that you? Hang on - let me get your father.’  
It’s that little breath when she picks up that stops me calling, ever,  
despite the thousand protestations and the begging to ‘stay in touch’, please, ‘just let us know you’re all right’.  
‘Hello, are you still there?’  
I’m breathing heavy from the shower steam and burping up hot dog and shampoo aroma.  
‘Zechariah?’ His voice, distant like it’s coming through a string attached to a tin can emotionally.  
‘’Sup?’  
‘Where are you? Are you all right?’  
‘I need some help,’ I say.  
I’m lighting a cigarette and searching through my pockets for the coke I scored off Joly.  
He sighs, ‘You know we can’t give you any more money.’  
‘Dad, this is _totally not like that_. I’m not asking you for _money_ , I need _financial aid_.’  
Snorting a line off the crescent shaped space between my thumb and forefinger.  
I can hear him mouthing ‘money’ to my mother through the hand he laid over the receiver.  
‘Zechariah?’  
‘All I need is like, a hundred bucks,’ I say.  
‘We can’t.’  
‘Two hundred.’  
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘you know we love -’  
I hang up.

 

Outside in the living room Bahorel is back to commentating on the Kardashian’s Wild Life,  
and the steam from the shower is clinging to my skin, making it clammier than it already was.  
You know you smell bad when you don’t even have to waft and sniff to start gagging at your own odor,  
so I start to peel my jeans off, think better of it, and climb in fully clothed.

 

Showering is one of those weird activities that doesn’t cost anything concrete (except for precious time) that I still somehow never get around to doing.  
And maybe I don’t like the way the water falls into my eyes.  
It’s still warm but oscillates between ice and dragon’s breath on my fevered skin.  
Maybe I could live without the way the constant stimulation of droplets on my scalp seems to fire up the nerves there, down through my skull,  
this persistent itch infuriating my jetlagged brain,  
because I can’t scratch it.  
Did my mom sound tired?  
(I’m sick, so I don’t really care.)

 

There’s that fear of what’s behind the shower curtain that makes no sense but pries your eyes open anyway, despite the danger of dripping shampoo foam,  
and the memory it stirs up of plastic bottles of Johnson’s No Tears on a shelf in Target,  
of the mom who always let you pick out your own, ‘one for each of you’, and handed you the change for candy,  
even though you’d already stuffed the pockets of your overalls with Reese’s and Skittles to shoplift and then eat all at once in the shower with your hair in a watermelon-scented pouf.  
And she’s the one who pretended to believe that you had something funny for dinner, a stomach bug, not that you don’t know when to stop, never knew.  
‘Our youngest is having some trouble adjusting,’ she’d smile at her friends whose kids were at the boarding school in Jersey you got kicked out of for smoking weed in the bathrooms,  
or accepted to Avenues and Dalton, who said ‘sorry’ as they explained to her, as gently as possible, that they can’t take on students with substance abuse and behaviour problems.  
It’s not like you weren’t aware of extra urgent calls to therapists and ‘Phoenix House’, the bullshit afterschool kiddie rehab she begged you desperately to ‘please just try’,  
the drug forums your dad scours on his computer at work for notices of bad batches in the NYC/NJ area,  
and the aborted phone calls from the house line,  
‘how are you?’ re: are you still alive?

 

You realise, in a second of shampoo smell induced sanity, that the little breath at the beginning of a phone call isn’t some melodramatic sigh of relief meant to make you feel guilty, to drive you crazy,  
she buys snack food and stocks up a fridge no one eats from on compulsion,   
because you used to whine that you were _hungry_ when you were twelve,  
and there’s Maria, who cleaned your grandmother’s flat before this one, humming as she throws away loaves of mouldy bread and blocks of cheese,  
your dad deleting his search history on the work PC,  
your sister writing essays on addiction for top marks in Psychology,  
and the brother who still holds the word ‘heroin’ out in front of him like it’s a loaded gun,  
‘I just don’t understand - your - problem’.  
And as easy as it is to think, which you usually do, that they’d all prefer it if this piss-pressure water could somehow work you to sand a couple million years in advance and send you swirling down the drain into the Hudson,  
it’s that stupid fucking breath again,  
the knowledge that she genuinely means it when she wants to know, ‘are you all right?’  
and her life is just as wrecked as yours,  
only you don’t think about any of that half as much as she does.  
It’s easy to forget to be sorry about what ‘normal’ was supposed to be when you’ve alienated yourself from it so severely that you don't have to think twice about bathing fully clothed.

 

I turn off the water and slip out to drip on the carpet as Bahorel pounds his way in ‘for a piss.’  
He doubletakes, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’  
‘Laundry,’ I’m flooding the tile floor with my soaked clothes and rooting through the medicine cabinet.  
‘Detergent’s under the kitchen sink,’ says Bahorel, who seems to find this totally reasonable.  
He’s shaking his dick over the toilet bowl and eying the rest of the coke in its labelled baggy.  
(‘This one’s cut with insolubles,’ Joly said, ‘so it’s basically useless to me. I hate snorting.’)  
‘Cool,’ I squirt some toothpaste onto my tongue and rinse and spit, because what the hell, ‘ _by the way_ , you can totally get a line off that for ten bucks, man.’

 

The Huggies commercial is back on  
with a smiling fat baby waddling across a white room  
and Bahorel, a scarlet blur in his Aerosmith t-shirt,  
all waving arms and Steven Tyler’s thick lips.

 

‘So these assholes want to cut off my financial aid, and I’m like - fuck no, man, but they have some bullshit policy about finishing your degree in under five years or something. What the fuck, right? So I said to him, ‘look, Barry _Manilow_ , I like to take my time’ - ’

 

I’m smoking on the couch in borrowed underwear, waiting for Montparnasse to answer my texts.  
Wondering if this bowl of Oreos doused in milk counts as a ‘nutritious part of this complete breakfast’.

 

‘And man,’ he stops suddenly in his tracks, ‘Grantaire, man, it’s not even like I don’t like you staying here. You’re all right, you know? Taking a shower in your fucking clothes - first time Bossuet brought you over, I was like, ‘where the fuck did he find this guy’. I mean, bathing really works for you, you know? You just need like, I mean, don’t get me wrong, you are _rocking_ the 70’s If-Iggy-Pop-Joey-Ramone-and-A Reject-Bin-At-Goodwill-Had-A-Baby aesthetic, but you need a fucking _statement_ piece, know what I mean? Do get me wrong, man. Get me so wrong - you need statement _pieces_. You ever been to Rags-a-Gogo? They have an entire section of leathers. You have the height, you know? You’re like a baby giraffe, man, _Grantaire_ , all I’m saying is ‘leather pants’. Dress up those legs, put on some deodorant - you’d be a total stud. That’s how I met my girl Rosie, you know? _Leather fucking pants_ , man, I’m just saying: think about it.’

 

‘Dude,’ I say, ‘Bahorel, bro, I would be so turned on to that idea if I had the money.’

 

I’m like, not even expecting anything.

 

‘You know what, man, I can’t even say no anymore. It’s not like it gets my panties in a bunch, you know what I mean? You’re a big boy, what the hell? What’s twenty bucks?’  
‘Oh my god, dude, really?’ I might have tears in my eyes,   
but they are 100% entirely from swallowing a chunk of Oreo down the wrong pipe. ‘You just saved my life, bro. You’re a fucking _lifesaver_.’  
‘I mean, I am pretty fucking cool,’ Bahorel agrees.

 

He gives me twenty bucks in fives and two cigarettes for the road and promises I can ‘pay him back when I have it’.  
‘No rush, it’s whatever I had left of my Pell Grant,’ he grins,  
which we both agree is badass, fuck the man, etc etc.  
There is also the issue that my jeans, t-shirt and jean jacket are still soaking wet and cold on the fire escape outside.  
(‘Looks like a bird shit on them, too,’ Bahorel squints, ‘Another reason to hit up Rags-a-Gogo.’)

 

Generosity unforch does not cut it when it comes to clothes  
because Bahorel wears 32x30s and I apparently have those ‘giraffe legs’ to his ‘four foot of torso Hollister genetics’.  
We manage to dig out a pair of flannel pyjama pants from under Bossuet’s bed that are ‘almost acceptable’  
and Bahorel gives me another lesson in Badass Style,  
which by his definition seems mostly to consist of wild colours, lots of plaid, leather on everything,  
‘And combat boots, man. I only got arrested once in 2011, and I was frontline, fucking tearing shit up, battling cops in riot gear. Arrested once and pepper sprayed zero. Cops: null, me: five million. Combat boots, man. You want to get in the action, you need shoes that were _built_ for action, you know what I mean?’

 

So that’s how I end up smoking out front of a McDonalds in Flatbush wearing plaid flannel PJ’s, an OCCUPY! t-shirt in lurid orange that not even my still damp jean jacket can fully cover and a pair of old combat boots that are a surprisingly good fit.  
Needless to say, it’s forty-nine degrees out and I’m freezing my ass off  
trying to talk my stomach down from its Revolution against my nutritious and complete Oreo breakfast,  
and Montparnasse is late.

 

_Call your mother_ , my dad has texted three times now.  
And then, _Hello Grantaire! This is Marius Pontmercy from the meeting on Thursday. I was wo_ …. which I ignore.  
I toy with the fantasy that my mom has finally changed her mind  
and is just waiting for me to call with the numbers for my checking account so she can transfer $200 pronto.  
This is all about as likely to happen as a successful sequel to _the Mask_ , which depresses me.  
The phone pings again and my heart speeds up, thinking Montparnasse, or the address of a P.O. Box somewhere in the city containing a check with my name on it, ‘please be safe love mom’:  
Prouvaire: _dark side of the rainbow_?  
 _overrated_ , I text back, thinking, then add, _unless you have snacks & pants._  
 _you know where i live_.

 

It’s been an hour and three stomach-churning dollar coffees.  
At this point, I’ve like transcended shivering,  
my fingertips are numb and it’s only the smell of acrid burning plastic that lets me know I have smoked my last cigarette down to the filter.  
Concerned abuelita on the opposite corner shooting me periodic glances.  
(She’s been here five minutes and probably wants to know if I need escorting back to Bellevue in this get-up.)  
Resigned to be in it for the long haul, I flick the burnt filter away and go back inside.

 

This is where Eponine finds me, sprawled at a table with my fourth coffee thirty-six minutes later.  
(‘Could I get that one for free, since I already bought so many?’  
Girl behind the counter had narrowed her eyes at her register and shrugged.)  
Just calling her ‘Eponine’ sounds too casual,  
like I’m not talking about a sixteen year old in a cheap mini dress  
with pink lipstick she probably pocketed at Rite Aid smeared across her pouty thin lips  
eyelashes held up like black wires away from her round freaky adult-in-a-child’s-body eyes.

 

‘I can’t believe he even bothers with you anymore,’ she says in greeting.  
‘That why he sent you?’  
She flicks a lacquer chip from the tip of her nail and mutters something about ‘better things to do’.  
I’m bouncing in my seat.  
‘You could buy me something to eat,’ she huffs, sliding into the booth. ‘I don’t even want to hear you talk until you buy me something to eat.’  
At this point, I will literally do anything,  
or close to it,  
a cheeseburger seems like a pretty good deal.  
‘And fries,’ Eponine says. ‘And a chocolate milkshake. Don’t even argue.’  
I shut my mouth, pull out my cash, and tell myself repeatedly that if a dog barks in an empty wood and no one’s around to hear it, the dog never barked at all  
and if no one _sees me_ at the beck and call of a sketchy sixteen year-old girl,  
well, it’s like it never happened.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will be more amis, but this seemed like a good place to cut off for now.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire spends quality time with an old friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to everyone who has left a comment. I am working on responses, but in advance of them - a very big thanks, you guys are great and I hope this continues to please?????
> 
> Also theme song of this chapter is: Jesus Walks/Kanye West

 

 

Eponine is waiting for me outside the bathroom door,   
slurping on a chocolate milkshake through a pink-stained straw with the wire-framed eyes that make me think, if I were simultaneously a llama and emperor of a small mountainous country, she’d be after my blood.   
‘Your jacket’s inside out,’ she says.     
‘Disguise,’ I’m lighting a cigarette attached to the straw of an empty cup.     
Trick invented with Bossuet back in high school,    
when one of the biggest dilemmas of the day was finding a way to smoke in Burger King in January.     
‘In case I ran back into you.’ 

  


‘Ha.’     
The combination of smoke curling up from under the lid and her crooked sideways glance,     
all eyelash and smudged lipstick,    
have a curdling effect on my stomach.     
There’s that thing where some people are walking words or concepts,    
(like I’m pretty sure if you googled  ‘impassioned’     
the image results would be full of Commie Adonis’s scowlingly hot face)    
and Eponine, by the same rule, would come up under ‘desperation’ in every sense,    
some vaguely disturbing combination of ‘she wants you/she wants to be you/she wants to rob you’    
that freaks me the fuck out. 

  


 

I say, ‘I already paid you.’     
‘I know.’ She’s keeping step, lighting a cigarette of her own as we hit the sidewalk. ‘Where are you going?’     
‘Somewhere.’    
‘I’m coming with you.’ 

  


(This is heading too far into Hallmark movie territory.     
Needy teenager clings to a sketchy friend in the Gritty City,    
found family shit,    
translates in real life to your name on a list of guys who aren’t allowed to hang out around public parks    
and a date with a cop’s boot and a shank on Rikers Island.    
I’m thinking: ruuuun.)

  


‘No you are fucking not.’     
And there’s something almost skeletal about her face for a hot second, batlike and beady,    
like her goosebumped arms are hiding wings, sharp claws,    
for some reason I’m thinking of thestrals and dark shit, and how Eponine could be invisible to the virgin eye    
that has never seen death.    
Did I ever see anyone die?     
(Apart from my own soul, ha ha ha)     
‘Fuck off,’ I say, ‘What the fuck? You can’t come with me.’ 

She’s blowing smoke rings.     
‘Why not?’     
‘ _Because you’re sixteen _ .’     
‘Didn’t bother you ten minutes ago when I was selling you -’     
‘And this shit _fucking sucks_ , dude,’ jabbing my finger into my chest for good measure. ‘And exactly my point. I don’t need to get picked up _chilling _  with a sixteen year-old girl and Schedule 1 drugs. What the fuck.’     
‘So, don’t get picked up,’ says Eponine, infuriatingly.    
I’m planning my escape for the next time she blinks    
because I’m not a fucking idiot    
when her phone pings. 

She looks pale beneath her makeup and harassed,     
‘Good luck not getting arrested.’     
It’s not even sarcastic, no edge.    
I hope she’s leaving.     
‘Thanks,’ I say.     
‘Parnasse says wait here a sec.’     
Just like that, my interest = piqued.     
The chances of ‘wait here’ meaning ‘he’s bringing you free shit, Grantaire’ are like 1:20000000    
but I don’t have an extra buck to play the lottery.    
This seems like a reasonable alternative.    
‘Ok fine.’

  


Montparnasse and his gang friends run on dealer time.    
A second is a minute is half an hour.     
I share a smoke with  Eponine  (hers)    
and we’re almost friendly because she’s shivering in that cheap dress    
me in my denim jacket.     
‘So,’ I say, ‘do you, like, go to school?’     
She flicks the lit butt into an open car window. 

‘I’m not  _stupid_ , if that’s what you mean.’     
She’s got the bat face and the  Yzma eyes    
and I’m like 98% sure she carries a shiv in her purse.     
‘I can read and keep the count and all that. My dad taught me chemistry.’     
This said with some bizarre and inflated sense of pride that turns her cheeks pink.    
‘What, like Rite Aid chemistry?’     
It’s a totally dangerous thing to say.    
I’m prophylactically reciting the  kaddish  for myself in my head, but she shrugs.     
‘It’s _knowledge _ ,’ she wipes her nose. ‘Parnasse  is waiting around the corner.’

  


Parnasse’s  beamer has that ‘new car smell’.    
Nauseatingly leather,     
like he keeps a bottle of the scent to spritz the seats with in between drives.     
‘You said _ten minutes_ ,’ Eponine whines.     
‘So? You lived.’     
They’re holding hands in between the front and back seats.     
‘ _M_ _arceloooo _ .’     
‘How many times I have to tell you don’t call me that?’     
‘You’re such an ass,’ says Eponine, but she’s running circles over his wrist with her thumb. 

  


‘Montparnasse’ has got to be the most pretentious street name in the  tri-state  area.     
It’s French for a Greek mountain and a  neighbourhood  in Paris where artists live.     
Parnasse’s  real name is Marcelo Parnassos-Montes,    
double-barreled because his dad was hot but bailed back to Sao Paulo before he was born,    
and his mom never recovered.     
This I learned when we were 16 and 13 respectively,    
smoking roll-ups out the chicken-wire window of our dorm at Tryon.    
(My mom had cried all through the trial in youth court,    
which is where they send you to be convicted when you are 16-bordering-on-17-and-an-intimidating-6’2” but your parents make $400K+ a year,    
rather than being tried as an adult and shipped off to  Rikers .    
I rolled in barred out and possibly still drunk from the night before,     
saucer eyes and arguing against myself mostly for the benefit of the judge, in case she had any doubts.    
‘You were offered a plea bargain with _community service hours_ , for fuck’s sake, what the _fuck _  did you do in court?’     
My case manager couldn’t believe he had to work with such an obvious imbecile.     
‘Dude,’ I said, ‘If I go back to school, I have to do my  _ math _ homework.’)     
I got out after four months of boring and moderately painful youth detention.    
Parnasse  had a year, but they let him out after six because he’s ‘child model gorgeous’,    
like a baby Lucifer, forced to crawl the Earth in snakeskin shoes pushing lowgrade dope on kids who try to pay him in Nintendo DS games.     
(Note: Montparnasse is too cool for video games.) 

  


‘Montparnasse is such a stupid ass name,’ Eponine huffs. ‘Who the hell - ’    
‘Not one of my finest ideas,’ I agree.     
She glares at me and the seat squeaks as Parnasse lets go of her hand to face the front again.     
‘You gave Ponine my money?’     
He’s adjusting his sunglasses in the rearview mirror.     
‘I need that to drive yo,’ complains the significantly older guy behind the wheel.     
I’m pretty sure his name is Ba-bae or some other pun on ‘baby’,     
which is ironic considering the facial hair & creepy age difference.     
‘Two  secs ,’ says Parnasse, which of course means 15+ minutes.     
‘You think I’m _stupid_ , I can’t remember to take the cash first?’ Eponine hisses.    
Squeaking, they’re holding hands again and Parnasse is still turning his head from side to side in the rearview mirror.     
He says, ‘Nah,’ and she settles back, mollified. 

  


We’re tearing through South Brooklyn.    
Kanye blaring from the back speakers so loud that each beat is like a blow to the chest.     
Eponine  passes me a cigarette before lighting one of her own and I remember to say ‘thank you’ because her morally corrupt boyfriend is sitting in the passenger seat.    
He’s busy watching the way his face changes when he pouts his lips in the side view mirror, but I’m not taking any chances.     
‘Here,’ says Montparnasse after what feels like an hour of driving. 

  


Ba-bae pulls in at the end of a boring looking residential street.    
Going off the brick and the T-Mobile on the corner with signs in Russian, I’m guessing we’re in Brighton Beach.     
‘Tall Boy.’ Squeaking, he turns in his seat to face me. 

  


I was the tallest kid at Tryon.    
This would apparently have been useful in real jail.    
In ‘youth detention’ it marks you as an immediate threat to the sweaty, blue collar dickhead YDAs in charge of your wellbeing.     
Four months of being body slammed for making yo momma jokes and ‘talking back’ were kind of worth the cred & badass street name, though. 

  


‘Think you could do me a favour,Tall Boy? You up to that?’     
(If free drugs are involved, I am 100%  _ always up for it _ .)    
I’m like, ‘What do you need, man?’     
Montparnasse smiles, and it’s all even, white teeth. 

 

 

  


The game is: Montparnasse has come into a collection of blank checks and virgin credit cards    
by dubious means for sure,     
but in exchange for my participation I will be paid ‘handsomely’.     
My participation requires: 

  * A hooded sweatshirt provided by Ba-bae, who makes a point of showing me his piece after I wipe my nose on the sleeve. 

  * A fake ID that doesn't really look like me, but what the hell. 

  * Wrapping my hands around the sleeves of said sweatshirt while handling any checks/credit cards. 

  * A slough of shady bodegas with uninterested clerks, C-Town supermarkets with lotto counters, anywhere that personal checks can be cashed that is not a bank. 




‘In, out,’ Montparnasse says. ‘I know how you like to chat. Don’t be stopping to chat, don’t be looking in the aisles, don’t spend my money. In, out.’    
‘Ok.’    
‘Repeat after me, Tall Boy. ‘In, out.’’    
Beside me, Eponine is filing her nails.     
‘In,’ I say. ‘Out. Parnasse, bro, I got it. In, out. I could do this shit in my sleep, I’m totally serious. I was walking in and out of bodegas from the womb, man, bro, _ I got it _ .’     
‘You talk too fucking much,’ Ba-bae says. 

  


‘Let me just get one hit before I go in there, man. I’m serious. I just need to top off.’     
Parnasse  is watching me with the squinty eyes behind his sunglasses.     
My skin itches.    
‘Ponine, give me a water bottle,’ he says.     
‘Oh _fuck_ no. You can’t cook that shit up in here. Not when I’m right here, fuck  _no_.’     
‘Close your eyes,’ says Montparnasse in that dangerous low voice he had mastered even at 13,    
when his nickname was ‘Killer’.     
‘Why the fuck - ’ Eponine complains,    
but she does it.     
‘Do you see it?’     
‘See what?’     
‘Do you see,’ says Montparnasse, ‘the question mark at the end of that sentence?’     
The water bottle ricochets off the dashboard and into Parnasse’s lap    
and Eponine is outside the car, flipping him the bird,     
‘Fuck you, you piece of shit asshole.’     
‘Love you, bae,’ he says back without looking. 

  


I’m mostly nervous I might drool on the check I’m trying to shove into the hands of the  dedushka  behind the counter.     
He reeks of cheap booze, so we might be even.     
‘There is ten dollar charge,’ he says,     
points out some sign in Cyrillic lettering, handwritten, bordered by foil Mickey Mouse stickers.     
I’m pretty sure it’s a list of sandwiches available when the bodega doubles as a deli from the hours of 8-5.     
We both know it’s bullshit.     
‘Store policy.’    
‘It’s cool, man,’ I say. ‘Totally  _harasho.  Spasibo_.’ 

  


We repeat this at eight bodegas and one C-Town between Brooklyn and Queens for a total of $2,623.12.     
‘Petty change,’ says Montparnasse dismissively.     
Eponine  rolls her window up and down and lights a cigarette.     
(Their linked hands are swinging between the front and back seats.)    
‘So, can we eat now or what?’     
‘What you want to eat?’     
The look he shoots her is supposed to be ‘suggestive’,    
one eyebrow raised and the male model bedroom eyes,    
but projected across him from the back of my mind is this scrawny thirteen year old with an uneven buzzcut and a missing tooth (‘All right, all right,’ he told me one night, ‘that shit’s my baby teeth, son. My grandma took me to the dentist and all that and he said I’m a Late Bloomer.’)    
too-big sweatpants torn and tied into a knot at the waistband so they don’t fall off,    
quiet and shy and small,     
though the entire cottage were convinced he was in for something grievous.     
(He was.)    
I’m thinking, beauty can be violent,    
but the thinking itself is exhausting, so I ditch it and let my chin hit my chest.

  


‘Get Tall Boy a BigMac.’     
I’m watching Parnasse flatten his eyebrows into shape in the rearview mirror through one cracked eye.    
Delicate movements,    
must be bizarre to be stabbed by him,    
seeing those careful fragile gestures and never thinking until it’s too late,    
maybe the flash of silver wasn’t just some stylish ring.     
He told me once he never buys Chanel because their jewelry’s fake.     
Eponine: ‘Wasting your money. Look at him. He can’t even sit up, how’d you expect him to eat a BigMac ?’     
That cheshire cat grin through my one cracked eye.    
Linked hands swinging near my knee.     
‘Told you I’d pay you well, didn’t I?’    
I open my mouth to agree and burp up coffee instead. 

  


They drop me off outside a subway station in Queens.     
Getting the rattle of the trains overhead in flashes.     
Phone beeping somewhere in a pocket that seems miles away.     
And the air feels claustrophobic.    
There’s a guy in studio art who claims his dealer smokes weed with a plexiglass cube around his head.     
I’d call bullshit, but I’m a hopeless dreamer    
and the idea of getting stoned in a plastic box seems pretty romantic.    
I remember I hate weed. 

  


_ still coming _ ?  Prouvaire .     
_ train_, I type back, check the time.    
He wrote me forty five minutes ago.    
My phone buzzes with a ‘message unsent’ error.    
Trying to telepathically communicate that I am underground, on my way, break out the snacks.     
Subway car rocks like a clumsy baby swing,    
and I’m like, maybe there’s time for a nap. 

  


Maybe not.     
I miss my stop.     
Ride back twenty minutes too long in the opposite direction.    
Wash, rinse, repeat.     
And something about the fluorescence of the lights overhead makes my skin look like butter.     
_ I’m old, Gandalf …_  
The boobjob ad over my head, sniggering twenty-something tourists who get on at 14th, one more    
and I remember to get out. 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grantaire and Prouvaire hang out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read 'blery' as the English 'bloody' but with a South African accent. 
> 
> This is a short chapter, more of a glimpse than anything, as Grantaire can only be so perceptive for so many minutes.

Starting junior year I’d ditch school right around the time I knew Maria was stopping by to clean  
noonish, before math but after lunch.  
Sneak in while she had the vacuum roaring - 12:55.  
She did bathrooms last and I napped to the sound of running water and muffled phone convos and the smell of Clorox that followed her like perfume  
nestled up in a down comforter & about five pillows.  
Something about the distorted soft sounds through the walls/down/sheets/thick air of an empty apartment  
like they were slipping through amniotic fluid;  
I always liked the idea of submarines, spaceships, sleeping bags, camping tents, curling up in the back of a closet during hide & seek  
all those dark warm claustrophobically comfortable spaces waiting to be climbed into  
and ‘embrace me like a womb’.  
(a la Russell Brand)

 

You can sometimes achieve a synthetic version of this by drinking past the point of blackout.  
Different from the happiness blackout at your Harry Potter themed 11th birthday party,  
darker & more nauseous & without the M&M stained mouth.  
But equally as short-lived.  
Various other methods exist.  
(I have a theory about human beings and how we’re all still fucked up  
over having been forced to leave the womb so soon).  
Prouvaire’s is called ‘secret gardening’.

 

This is a lifestyle choice, he explains, not a one-time thing.  
He has to repeat it three times because I wasn’t sure if I had dreamt the first two.  
The point is: his room doubles as a greenhouse + smokehouse.  
‘More like a green and brown house,’ I say.  
He admits that it can be a challenge remembering to water about fifty assorted potted plants in between huge hits off his porcelain bong, but  
‘Death is also a part of life,’ he says.  
‘Solid logic.’  
He nods and points to a pot on the windowsill, surrounding curtains bunched up and scattered with fallen soil.  
‘The hyacinths are my favourite.’  
(The hyacinths are dead).

 

We’re splayed out across his daybed watching one of those ultrabright Telemundo variety shows.  
Chicks in short skirts pretending to be elementary school students  
dancing with pencils as tall as they are  
while a ‘conventionally attractive’ guy in a sailor suit (????) that was clearly designed to emphasise the bootylicious curvature of his ass cheeks sings something poppy into an oversized mic.  
Prouvaire says, ‘Whoever does their lighting has a gift.’  
‘You think sailorbro got ass implants?’  
He shakes his head, ‘Some things are god-given.’  
I’m like, ‘ _Sounds kinda gay_.’  
Shaking his head again, which dispels a cloud of dank smoke in my direction.  
‘God is an artist, Grantaire. A blery artist.’

 

At some point there are chocolate chip cookies and Totino’s pizza rolls from the kitchen downstairs.  
Offered by a scrawny dude in a bathrobe who seems to be battling the urge not to back out and away from the smoke,  
while also trying to ensure that Prouvaire gets food in him before he dies or goes into a hypoglycemic coma.  
Communal living at its finest.  
(I eat most of them and burp some up on my t-shirt.)

 

Prouvaire’s room is bizarre in a ‘cool way’.  
A down feather womb, hazy with bong smoke and muffled TV sounds and the heavy smell of potting soil.  
Twice I catch myself staring at the same psychedelic picture on the wall and wondering why the screen froze.  
He’s explaining ‘the egg theory’ in conspiratorial tones.  
‘I am the Walrus’ playing in the background, maybe I’m imagining that.  
Another synthetic version, no substances required  
flit repeatedly back to that space between dreaming and awake.  
Wonder if your top is spinning in its locker or lying still.  
Prouvaire’s voice a steady drone.  
But it’s Commie Adonis by the window  
his hair is more of an ‘organic/raw’ honey gold than white blond in the sunset.  
(Kind of sexy.)  
See how they run like pigs from a gun etc etc.  
(I’m crying.)  
‘Yo bro, you’re kinda hot when you talk conspiracy theories,’ I say to Prouvaire.  
And there are yellow flowers on the curtains.

 

‘Cardigan flowers.’  
‘What’s that, then?’  
He’s tipping water from a teacup into a cactus pot.  
His eyes are a normal off-white, and it’s dark outside, suddenly.  
I’m like, ‘Your curtains look like something my grandma would wear.’  
and there’s a sniff from the corner,  
muted gold,  
my mom used to buy wildflower honey from Germany,  
‘The fuck?’

 

‘Enjolras came over while you were asleep,’ Prouvaire says. ‘‘The Roots of Evil In The Asperities of an Unjust Society, as Portrayed by Brecht.’’  
‘Dude, did you take something without me?’  
I’m struggling to sit up from under the weight of three down comforters and a satin throw pillow.  
Commie Adonis coughs, but I’m feeling alive again, tight in my chest and snot-nosed.  
‘Because if you did, that’s totally ok, bro, but like, kind of ‘looking out for number one’ of you for a guy who goes to Commie AA meetings without a court order. I’m just gonna point that one out.’  
‘It’s the title,’ says Prouvaire  
pouring New Amsterdam into the teacup to drizzle over a baby rose bush  
‘For Enjolras’s English homework. Eight pages. ‘The Roots of Evil In The Asperities of an Unjust Society, as Portrayed by Brecht.’’  
He shakes the rose pot gently.  
‘Gin keeps the stems and leaves small without affecting the blossoms.’  
‘Groovy,’ I say, ‘I think my stems could do with some stunting.’

 

Commie Adonis does not drink,  
obviously.  
Not in the chill ‘I just don’t dig it but do what you want’ way  
or the more understandable pregnant chick way.  
He doesn’t just Not Drink, he actively disapproves.  
Sniff at each sip type, straight edge  
double x  
Puritan  
like that weirdly religious kid you never wanted to invite to your birthday party after seventh grade.  
‘But have you ever even _had_ a drink?’  
‘The point of which would be?’  
‘You might like it?’  
‘I might like a lot of things.’  
Prouvaire nudges the duvet back over my lap.  
‘Just like, FYI, dude,’ I say, ‘when you say things like that out loud and look like a Cobain-veela hybrid, like you do, all anyone hears is ‘sex’. That’s literally it. Sex. Just pointing that out.’  
‘I’d appreciate it,’ says Commie Adonis, ‘if you would make any future observations about me in silence.’  
He sniffs again, goes back to typing,  and I finish off the gin.  
‘Where’s the bathroom?’

 

Prouvaire’s bathroom is communal, which I should have seen coming.  
Note: I once OD’d in a Papaya Dog so my standards are hardly of the Michelin-variety.  
Prouvaire thinks that ‘bathrooms are overrated’.  
Plus he wants to watch.  
There is more artistic value in dressers, artisanal water imported from Iceland, and matches.  
I have to explain that holding a lit match for an extended period of time is less preferable to holding a lighter.  
Prouvaire revels in the idea of burnt fingertips;  
I do not.  
The downside to the whole plan is that I feel compelled to offer him a courtesy hit for the use of his living space,  
which I hope he’ll turn down.  
And he says (with a look at Commie Adonis, who has thundered the F key straight off the keyboard),  
‘Another time.’  
Thank God/Jesus/Allah/Dianetics/the almighty dollar/whatever.  
By some miracle I hit the good vein over my thumb on the first try,  
beautiful return,  
and G, R, Ctrl, Z clatter across the hardwood to join F at Commie Adonis’s feet.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is such a short one, but I've been muddlng my way through it for weeks trying to jump back on this train. In the meantime, have given birth and am now the mother of a 6 month old, currently sleeping in a rocker at my knee while I edit the final lines of this heavily notchildappropriate fict. Hope you enjoy.

Prouvaire's bathroom is stereotypically communal and cramped,  
dark wood door like a shadow at the end of a white hall, neutral decor, chipped sink, toothpaste on the mirror but clean hand towels,  
and the little slatted window opens barred and cautious and foggy frosted glass onto the street.  
I flush the toilet and wipe my mouth, run some water from the sink across my teeth.  


Even the shabby breeze whispering its way through this window is a refreshment to the thick atmosphere of Prouvaire’s room, where I’m guessing Commie Adonis is still plucking away at his keyboard, typing up some new manifesto  
or five point program,  
The Answer to the New World Order,  
the kind of shit you get into when your politics have transcended the general coming-of-age-at-college story and entered Baader-Meinhof territory.  
(It’s still hot, ok, but my stunted libido needs a sec to cool off.) 

 

'Grantaire?'  
'Sup?'  
'Can I come in?'  
'Barge in, Marge.' 

 

Prouvaire.  
He even gets me all fucking poetic and shit.  
Gnawed gnarled fingernails with potting soil and graphite tips under dark circles under dark eyes,  
and the sweater that the yarn machine 'threw up',  
and the plaid pants with the Housing Works oxfords,  
and 'What's it feel like?'

 

'Hard to explain.'  
'Try it some time?'

 

I make a move like 'sure' and do my Signature double thumbs up.  
'Enjol-rad still there?'  
'Yeah, man’s got at least five pages to go. Long night.'  
'Sounds like a riot.'

 

'Grantaire,' he starts.  
Grrrront-ehrrrr.  
'It feels really fucking good, man. Obviously,' I say.  
Prouvaire raises his eyebrows, and I get this fleeting stab of panic.  
'Extremely good. Maybe you shouldn't do it.’

 

There is a type of person who hears ‘you shouldn’t do it’ and wants to right away.  
The five year old loud kid in the class taking bets over a jar of pickle juice,  
puking green down a Ninja Turtles t-shirt to raucous applause and cheering.  
That was not Prouvaire.  
(That was me.)

 

‘I think I want to,’ he says slowly. ‘Sometime. I like extremes.’  
‘Your call, dude,’ I say, and do the double thumbs up. ‘I’m not gonna like, peer pressure you. I’m not like that. _I_ don’t even like that I do this shit, it’s just become like, a part of me. I’ve been doing it for so long, it’s been committed to my autobiographical memory and forged with the rest of the abstract shit that makes up my sense of self, you know?’  
He shifts and laughs and starts to blush his way back out of the doorway. 

 

I follow him back to his room, where Commie Adonis is chilling on the bed with his laptop,  
and by chilling I mean staring so hard at the screen he looks like he’s trying to coax his eyes to pop out of their sockets and take an evening stroll across his cheekbones. 

 

‘What’s the deal, Neil?’  
His eyes don’t move from the screen.  
He says: ‘My name isn’t Neil.’  
‘ _Enjolras_. Is that a family name? Like _Claire_?’  
‘Excuse me?’ 

Then there are people who grew up under rocks, in the woods, with only copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Communist Manifesto to keep them company.

 

‘Forget about it,’ I say.  
‘It’s a surname,’ he says.  
‘So is _Grantaire_.’  
‘Would you mind talking with Prouvaire or something? I have to get this done.’  
‘What is it, then? Johnny? Joey? _Antoine_?’  
I’m leaning back onto the mattress in what I think is probably a ‘cool’ pose,  
lounging with my hands behind my head, watching Commie Adonis’s fingers tense over the keyboard.  
He’s uncomfortable, because he’s charmingly weird and antisocial.  
‘ _Ghislaine_? That was a pretty fucked up part of that movie, not gonna lie. Fucking Doinel. Imagine you carry the shit out of this fetus for nine months, and then your asshat husband goes and officially names it the wrong thing because he doesn’t want to seem too bougie. You can _not_ live in a corner apartment like that and dye flowers for a living and not be artistically bougie. Who could afford that?’  
‘I could,’ says Prouvaire wistfully.  
Commie Adonis frowns just slightly. 

 

I’m guessing I have a window of about two minutes of this D minus kindergarten banter left between us before he snaps his laptop shut and runs for the safety of the library.  
Because I have no self control, I press on anyway. 

 

‘Dick? Larry? Kenny? _Ken_?’  
‘Hm.’  
‘Peter Parker.’  
‘What?’ 

 

‘Oh my god,’ I say, ‘Are you a feral child, dude? Did someone find you in the woods and teach you how to speak when you were like, eighteen?’  
The laptop snaps shut.  
‘You know what,’ he says. Stands. ‘I think you should go and find some back alley to get high in, or whatever it is you do.’  
I raise my hands.  
‘That an invitation?’  
’That was an indirect way of saying ‘fuck off’,’ Prouvaire pipes in helpfully. He has a flush to his cheeks again, and he’s gripping the base of some prickly looking plant by the window. ‘Enjolras, I- I think you should sit down, mate.’  
‘ _ Yeah _ ,’ I butt in, because of the aforementioned lack of self control.

 

Prouvaire shoots me another raised eyebrow, you-are-not-helping-yourself look.  
Oh well. I never help myself at anything when there’s plenty to help myself to. 

 

‘I just want to get friendly here, man,’ I say. ‘I’m a friendly guy.’  
Enjolras is chewing on his lip. I get the feeling there’s a lot he could find to disagree with in that statement.  
I have to admit it came out creepier than intended.  
‘I’m trying to focus,’ he says finally.  
His voice sounds like it’s been steam-pressed and hemmed.  

 

‘Look, dude,’ I say, ‘I’m not trying to kill your commie-mojo or whatever. I’m just  _ lightening the mood .  _ Keep taking yourself so seriously, you’ll end up in Bellevue or on Riker’s. You ever have potatoes made from powder before? That’s like three Michelin stars above the grub they put out. They _ specialise _ in indigestion. Bathroom line so long you have to pull a number. Talk about your huddled masses.’ I’m back in my old spot on the bed, taking the apple Prouvaire offers and waving the yellow flame of a BIC lighter over the stem.  ‘You look like the kind of guy who enjoys a nice salad, so trust me on this one.’ 

 

‘If you insist on staying,’ he says, ‘stay on your side of the room and keep your comments to the only person here who cares about them - yourself.’  
‘Ouch.’ I’m making myself comfy on the five thousand duvets with Prouvaire’s expertly carved apple. I’m like, ‘I’m always open to feedback. Questions/comments/concerns. Long resume at fielding harsh criticism. Tenth grade drama. What I lacked in attendance and work ethic, I made up for in the ability to take a punch to the ol’ ego. Try me, dude. Insult my hair or something.’  
There’s a ten second or whatever the fuck pause while Commie Adonis hesitates over his keyboard.  
Prouvaire sagely rolling _la Tulipe_ in the corner, pauses, considers his handiwork and thins it out for _le Couteau_ instead.  
We’re all waiting  
(I’m waiting)

Commie Adonis goes back to typing, the living definition of  _ focus _ .  
‘You’ve bathed,’ he says.  
‘All for you,’ I shoot back maybe too fast.  
He pauses again and I’m read to ask Prouvaire to end my misery with the paper edge of his _ Couteau .  _

 

‘Good,’ says Commie Adonis in that hemmed up voice, the awkward kid in ninth grade math who you invited to your birthday party  _ just in case he was planning on shooting up the school at some point in the near future _ . 

(I bury my lower body under a thick padding of down blankets and settle in for a long nap). 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I'm so grateful for every single response to this that I get. You guys keep me going when I start to doubt the quality of my writing and the direction I take things. I'm hoping to make this my first finished long chaptered fict ever one day. For you.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A family reunion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair fucks to you if you're still reading after all this time! Many thanks to the people who have given feedback - blahblah should be writing for myself and not the audience, but you keep me going!
> 
> Disclaimer: if you can't tell from this, drugs are pretty dangerous and ruin a lot of shit. This fict is never meant to glorify any of the stuff that occurs in it, just to tell a good story. Don't do drugs.
> 
> Music:
> 
> The Void by the Raincoats  
> Lola by the Raincoats
> 
> The Bewlay Brothers by David Bowie

 

 

Three days pass in a haze of potting soil black and green and brown.  
I spend a lot of time wrapped up in a duvet by the window sweating and pondering my inevitable death.  
I have the weirdest feeling Prouvaire is wrapped up with me,  
fitful dreams of grimy alleys and dark rooms and the heat of breath on my neck.  
He plays a lot of Bowie and Mugison and the Raincoats.  
In the fog of my brain, his accent sounds thicker than usual:  
‘Ahm thinking, lahk, a claessical remux of the Void wuth Mindilssohn.’  
‘Mozart.’  
‘Nah,’ he says.  
Mozart is beautiful but fulfilled.  
Mendelssohn is deep and longing, _Sehnsucht_ as music, and Prouvaire is a fan.

‘You know that feeling,’ he says, ‘like you’re homesick for something that you’ve never seen before?’  
I’m trying to scratch my balls, discretely, without disturbing the delicate balance of his arm across my chest.  
‘Not really.’  
‘Yes, you do.’  
And there is something creepily unending about his dark eyes in the shadow of his lashes,  
A high that goes claustrophobic, shutting you in on yourself,  
here you are six, twelve, sixteen, twenty-two.  
A blur of cartoons and corn pops and shitty beer.  
And the acid gasoline taste of cheap rosé in your throat, the way your brain lurches in your skull as you punch in the number on the elevator, key in the lock, surprising them both at the dinner table with a request to see your baby book.

Prouvaire jabs me in the ribs. [x2]  
I’m like, ‘Always felt like I should be into meth.’

  
The rest of the day is spent on black and white nouvelle vague films on a constant reel from the laptop on his weirdly modern desk.  
Prouvaire wants a remake - ‘ _Jules et Jim_ as a zombie movie’, and he cries when Doinel reaches the ocean because ‘it’s real freedom’ and he’s ‘too blery high, Grantaire’.  
We pause to make out and try limpdick sex that ends when I start to fall asleep with my face pressed into the pillow.  
Prouvaire is crying again into my neck, dark alleys and grimy rooms.  
‘I was born in the wrong century,’ he says.  
‘But you can still do the same shit.’ I’m thinking of renaissance festivals and turkey legs. I want to sleep.  
I need to eat.  
He shakes his head and sniffs against my back, says sadly,  
‘It’s not the same.’

I wake up sometime in the evening to the buzz of my phone against my cheek.  
Prouvaire is at the computer typing up last minute homework and it takes me a sec to notice the streak of gold in the corner -  
Commie Adonis back for revisions.  
Bossuet is on the line,  
‘Dude, where the _fuck_ have you been?’  
‘Camping, my guy.’  
‘You’re full of shit.’

Something might be wrong, because Bossuet is more the ‘swallow it and smile’ type than the ‘Spanish Inquisition’, but my ankle is tangled in one of Prouvaire’s three flannel sheets and refusing to be freed, so I’m like:  
‘I know, dude, it’s horrible. It’s like this inescapable compulsion. _I can’t help it._ I think I might need therapy.’  
The connection crackles.  
‘Wasn’t sure if I needed to rent a tux for your funeral or something,’ Bossuet says finally.  
My foot freed, I stand up and stretch.  
I’m rolling the trapped air out of my joints and hoping Commie Adonis is digging my three-days-of-Totino’s Pizza rolls bod.  
‘Don’t waste your last buck on a tux, buddy. You know my parents will bar you from my funeral,’ I say cheerfully. ‘Anyway, I’ll call you in a sec. Gotta find my pants.’  
Whatever he’s about to say is lost under the beep of an incoming text.

Joly:  
_I’m at Bossuet’s to, come back and I’ll give you my insolubles_

I ex out and check the inbox [9]

Bahorel wants to know _where the duck did u go_  
_dude_  
_don’t be a turd call basset so he can pay attention ur ducking up his intro 2 breaking bad_

Bossuet’s demented burner phone typing:  
_wnt 2 cm 2 vapiano jolys treat_  
_ynm_  
_thrs gd wine_

_k it’s bn 2days n im nt nannying u, bt txt or smth so i no u ddnt od in sbux agn_

_Grantaire?_

I blow through them, swipe to delete.

Matty:  
_Einstein died. Mom wants all home asap. Told her I’d let you know._

 _Sweet_ , I start to type, realise what I’m saying, backspace. _This still a thing?_  
It’s the kind of text you could expect of a guy who gives double thumbs up on the reg. If I wasn’t tired and cottonmouthed and starving to death I might look deeper into that,  
see how it must be a sign of my deep-seated discomfort with my emotions and an inability to put them into words,  
how I’m constantly looking for something that will make me feel right in my own skin,  
_Sehnsucht_ after a feeling of freedom or calm  
or just being.  
A beloved family pet is dead and to be honest I don’t really care because it’s 2:39 and I just remembered McDonald’s doesn’t do breakfast after 10.

‘Welp,’ I start off loudly enough to get Prouvaire’s attention.  
Commie Adonis glares _cornflower blue_ from his folding chair at the desk.  
‘I have to go to a funeral, but this was cool. We should do it again sometime.’  
Prouvaire’s eyebrows go way up.  
He says with interest, ‘Funeral for who?’  
‘Family cat.’ I’m pulling on the fleece pyjama pants and digging the Occupy! t-shirt out from behind the bed.  
‘What are they doing with the body?’  
Maybe it’s the dead hyacinths in the window, but this seems like a totally reasonable question to me.  
I shrug. ‘Probably sending it to the vet to be cremated. I dunno.’  
Prouvaire is leaning back slightly, biting his lip.  
‘I dabble in taxidermy,’ he says. ‘Amateur, but I could stuff him for you.’  
‘Cool,’ I say, ‘I’ll hit you up.’

He blushes and nods and does a little wave as I’m at the door.  
Something catches me on my way out, and I duck back in to kiss his forehead,  
thinking, he’s sweet.  
I mumble, ‘See ya around, dude,’ and back out again, nodding briefly at Commie Adonis -  
‘ _Enjolras_ ’  
and then I’m gone.

I like the C train because it’s old and dim and shakes back and forth over the tracks on the long stretch between 59th and uptown.  
It’s rush hour busy, but I end up with a corner mostly to myself and one chick who won’t move but side-eyes me from across the aisle with her hand over her nose.  
We have an unstaring contest until the train jolts into 96th with a muffled Darth Vader announcement about letting people off first, blahblah, and I wave goodbye.

The walk from the station is short.  
I'm feeling a quick dip into Whole Foods (their bathrooms are basically public property)  
stopping a sec to read the most poetic additions scrawled in black sharpie across the metal of the sharps container on the wall -  
_GO Die you FUckiNG JuNkiES_  
I dig around in my backpack, sifting through the shit that collects like sour cream at the top - spare underwear and old Cheetos bags - finding at the bottom some dying sharpie I forgot I had,  
the past weekend with Prouvaire has me feeling pretty fucking poetic:  
_JUNKIES_  
_ARE, ON average_  
_smarter than_  
_the SelF-Back-Patting-New-_  
_money Robots that think_  
_ShoppiNg here actually_  
_helps any thing but make_  
_Whole Foods a Fat Corporation ™_  
_just Like_  
_Garden of Eden_

It’s a busy day, and there’s a small line to the stall I’m in,  
a row of leather boots and ‘funky’ socks,  
someone knocks on the door to make sure ‘everything’s ok, man’.  
I can hear the edge to his voice,  
the unsaid ‘get the fuck out of there’,  
the desperation of a guy in a pair of tight jeans who really needs to drop a load.  
I flush slowly and deliberately, fumble the orange cap and decide to sacrifice this one rig to the cause.  
It makes a hollow sound as it hits the bottom of the metal box.  
‘Be right out, my guy,’ I say, and another voice barks out, ‘Zechariah?’

There are voices you can replay to yourself pitch-perfect in your own brain after a decade apart from their owners.  
Matty’s voice is not one of those voices.  
I can only guess it's him through the combination of shitty timing, location and circumstance.  
That and his tone of voice drips 'douchebag'.

I’m stuffing my lighter into my pocket, wishing I had one of those kits built into a shoe like in Trainspotting,  
which would be _badass_ , and I hear footsteps outside the door.  
The door is still shut.  
I consider my options.  
1\. I can stay in here and play dead until someone calls for a manager with a key and I am possibly banned from this location for at least as long as they can remember what I look like.  
2\. I pretend not to recognise my brother, not to be myself. I slip past him out onto the street and go back to Bossuet’s, where Joly is waiting to shoot up insolubles with me and Bahorel is making good use of his Netflix subscription.  
3\. See option 1 or 2 because I have nothing else.

The door, which I forgot to lock, swings open.  
It takes me a sec to match the brown shoes to the yellow and blue striped socks to the droopy brown hair and the ‘prominent’ brow bone that juts out above the ends of both of our eye sockets.  
He yanks me out by the corner of my t-shirt to clear the way for the aforementioned Concerned Shitizen,  
dragging us both to the sink so he can wash his hands.  
‘I heard about Einstein,’ is the first thing that comes out of my mouth.

Matty blinks.  
Somewhere in the lines of the _cool_ blue suit that is just-stylishly-too-tight and the _cool_ but professional _almost too long on top_ haircut is an awkward nerdy kid who once gave me a bloody lip with the end of a power cord over the best pieces at the Lego table in our shared playroom.  
I notice that he's carrying a man bag.  
He follows my eyes in the mirror, frowns and says, 'You know about Einstein because I told you.'  
'Oh yeah,' I put my hands in my pocket, thinking I might look like a kind of unshowered James Dean in _East of Eden_ , vulnerable but angry and hurt, or something. 'Bummer.'  
'Where the hell have you been?'  
More soap is applied.  
'Why does everyone need to know that?'  
'Because you look like shit, Zechariah. Where are you staying?'  
This while shaking his hands free of water and turning for the blow dryer.  
'Fuck off.' I say,  
but it's masked by a burst of hot air.  
He swings his bag back to the other shoulder and motions us towards the door.

Matty is a compulsive control freak.  
The shrieky kind who couldn't be second in line for the bus as a kid,  
directing old women onto the subway with the authority of a train conductor.  
He always steers his dates by the elbow and likes to order for everyone else at the table when he 'treats' for dinner,  
just in case anybody was planning on having anything fun.

'It's not that shelter on 29th street?'  
(Note: the smug guy in the ridiculously short blue suit would love for it to be that shelter on 29th street if it gave him a chance to shake his head knowingly at the dinner table and say something profound, _for God's sake, Zechariah_. )  
'What do you have against the shelter on 29th street?'  
And like clockwork -  
' _For God's sake, Zechariah_.'  
'I'm staying with a friend, dude, _relax_.'  
'A friend,' he repeats.

The aw shucks James Dean act, I decide, is too gay.  
I pull my hands out of my pockets and throw them up.  
'A friend. It's not your business. I'm a grown man.'  
'You're a brat,' he says.  
' _You're_ a brat.'

We match step for a block or two.  
The man bag swinging by his side,  
Matty makes each stride longer to match the little hollow that goes and comes in his cheek as he chews.  
I'm lighting a cigarette and trying to come up with a better way to store my arms while I'm not using them.  
Matty says, 'You have to put that out before we go in.'  
I stop short of the curb, check my watch.  
I have no watch.  
'How's your Walter?' I ask.

'My what?'  
' _Your Walter_.'  
' _Who_ is Walter?'

I'm watching ash fall from the tip of my cigarette to a crack in the curb,  
aware of the eyes on my back from Stanislas the doorman  
behind the glass facade of my parent's building.  
In the ranks of douchebags, Stan falls somewhere between Matty  
and my twelfth grade intensive algebra teacher Miss Kosciusko, who made me take her class from the hall for three weeks  
for not 'controlling my inside voice' better.  
He has the judgmental metropolitan doorman thing down to a science,  
the slicked hair and impassive frown that runs into an oily smile for nannies with kids and dogs  
and he's been dying for a chance to bar me from entering since I was like six.

' _Who_ is my Walter,' Matty wants to know. ' _What_ are are you talking about?'  
'Your Walter, dude, what the hell were you doing in 2003? Pounding sand?'  
'I don't have time for your bullshit pop culture trivia games,' says Matty.  
(He's jealous because he always had to work harder at everything to get the same mediocre results as me.)  
' _Angels in America_.'  
'I still don't know what you're talking about.'

I pinch the glowing embers off the end of my cigarette, pocketing the stub because it's painful for Matty  
with the leather strap of his man bag digging into the chip on his shoulder as he looks left and right to make sure we aren't being watched or recognised.  
He asks in a strained voice if we can 'finally go inside'.  
It's sad sounding enough that I take pity on him and agree.

'Matthew's fine,' he says once we're safely past Stan.  
I want to know if Matthew is also 'still chill about getting hitched to a raging cokehead.'  
'I am not a raging cokehead,' says Matty. His nostrils flare to like 125%. 'I have a job.'  
(Note: Matty is a raging cokehead and has been from the age of 19, when he went abroad to Spain for an exchange semester from Columbia and 'discovered himself' in a gay discoteca in Ibiza. This is largely ignored by the rest of the family because Matty also has a 'real job' with a 401k plan and stock options, and coke is a 'white collar drug', which is acceptable as long as he isn't blowing his nose all through family dinners.)  
'Good bathroom break policy a part of the corporate benefit package?'  
'Can you cut the shit for once?'  
'Your card or mine?'  
'Seriously _shut the fuck up, Zechariah_.'  
(This is why I never got hardcore into cocaine. Blatant aggression is anathema to my gentle partyhard soul.)

Bossuet calls at the front door,  
Matty slipping off to the bathroom  
and I can hear my mother's voice in the kitchen asking why no one 'even bothered to look for vegan gluten free options if you all decided on pizza, you guys!'

'Sup?'  
'What's up with Einstein?'  
'Nothing anymore,' I swing the front door back and forth on the hinges. 'Well, except Prouvaire might stuff him as a favour if I can get the body.'  
'I'm not even asking.'  
'Joly still there?'  
'Nope.' Bossuet coughs. 'But he left us his unusables.'  
'Yeah, cool, he said he would.' I'm wondering if there's time to go back out and smoke again. 'By the way, dude,' I say, 'I was just kidding, _you are definitely invited to my funera_ l.'  
I can tell as we hang up that Bossuet thinks this is 'not appropriate',  
but my mother is coming down the hall with her hand on her chest,  
looking for pearls to clutch.

She says, 'Oh, sweetheart....'  
This is followed by a long hug.  
'You need a bath. You look horrible. Where are you staying? It's not that men's place again?'  
I assure her x2 that it is 'not the shelter on 29th street', rubbing my chest where it feels bruised from pressing into her collar bone.  
'I don't like you in that place. I've heard stories.'  
'Lies and slander.'  
'Doesn't matter. There's no good reason for you to be there.'  
'Well, I'm _not_ there. I'm _neve_ r there. What is it with you people and the fucking shelter on fucking 29th street? It was _one time_.'  
'All right, all right.'  
We reach the guest bathroom across from my old room.  
She puts her hand on my arm. 'I'll bring you some clothes.'

And then I fall asleep standing in the shower.  
Wake up with water in my eyes and pounding on the door.  
My mom wants to know if I 'hurt my head.'  
She laid out pants, a 'nice' shirt with a collar.  
'They're yours, I hope they still fit!'

_for a second i can see myself in a parallel universe, tall well-fed purebred new york new money, columbia graduate, my parents beaming proud at university graduations and the reception at my wedding to some 'intelligent and decently attractive spitfire' i met in grad school, our 1.9 kids and their string of nannies, vacations in the pyrenees, holiday greeting cards that look like stills from the most boring documentary ever, 'my greige life', and i am possibly happy and relatively fulfilled, measuring my success in dollar signs and career boosts, voting 'socially liberal but fiscally conservative' proud to introduce my wife as 'my other half' when we go to dinner parties with similarly well-bred douchebags and we all laugh at our bratty kids and our awkwardly intellectual unfunny college humour and collectively pretend that we're above shitting our pants when we die old and alone in our fabulous dusty apartments that have already been packaged away into someone's inheritance_

Matty knocks to let me know that there's pizza and also he 'really has to pee'.  
'You can come in if you'll share, dude,' I whisper through the door.  
'Or you can get the hell out of there,' he says. 'It's not funny, Zechariah!'  
The buttonholes on this shirt are stiff.  
I ignore Matty and try out different hair parts in the mirror.  
'Get out of there!'  
There's a loud thud and the door shakes like he threw himself against it.  
I relent and open up and am instantly filled with regret  
as he shoves my head against the tile wall and holds it there.

' _Man, what the fuck_?'  
'You're such an asshole.' He applies more pressure to my temple so I'm stuck in a weird hunchback pose.  
Getting flashbacks of three, five, ten, thirteen,  
bloody noses over who gets to be the black pieces at checkers,  
secondhand He-Man PJs ripped out of my hands before I could put them on because  
_Zechariah will ruin them_ ,  
a constant roar of yelling and wrestling and whooping in the background,  
and there was the time he flushed my 'boy Barbies' in decapitated pieces down the toilet in the guest bathroom in return for my jumping on the lopsided papier maché Godzilla  
he brought home from camp  
(I was jealous).  
I'm spitting hair out of my mouth.  
'Look, bro,' I say, 'Not to be the Puritan at the party or anything, but I think you need to cut back on the coke a little bit - '  
'Can you just shut up, okay, Zechariah? Can you just shut up for once?'

I take a deep breath  
like you would with a wild dog  
and try to slip my head out from under his palm, but he presses harder, and even though it doesn't hurt  
it's not exactly helping me either.  
'Dude,' I say, 'Bro, I get it. You need to feel like you won the discussion, and I'm hard to beat because I'm not even playing to begin with. _That's totally fine_ , bro, but I need you to let go of my head because you're acting a little jacked up right now, and I think it would upset mom.'  
'You don't care about what upsets mom,' Matty says.  
'Not true, bro. I love mom a lot, ok? Look, I can't help it that we grew up in a culture that puts undue amounts of pressure on class conformity and overeducation at the expense of our creativity and emotional well-being.'  
I'm working my right hand against the wall for push-off, but Matty lets go suddenly.  
'Get out of here,' he says. 'I have to pee.'  
I take the hint and make back for the nearest window to smoke out of.

 

Matty is not talking to me at dinner.  
This is an unintended consequence that I'm totally chill with.  
'There's cheese, pepperoni and sausage, and dad went out for this rice flour crusted one - it's vegan and gluten free,' my mom is saying somewhere down the table.  
I'm falling asleep into a glass of Pepsi,  
watching my sister Leah chase the same square of pizza around her plate with a fork, and my dad is miming putting a napkin in my shirt collar.  
'You look exhausted,' he says.  
'I've had a long week,' I say, ' _A lot_ of homework.'  
Matty snorts into his Pepsi. 'Please.'  
I watch Leah stuff a pizza crust down her sleeve while no one's watching.  
She turns to my dad, 'Can you pass me another slice of the vegan one?'

Everything about this room is beige and pastel and subdued,  
from the smile painted across my mother's face to the plastic napkin rings;  
the pizza on paper plates printed in some cheesy birthday theme,  
my dad with his non-alcoholic beer in the appropriate glass,  
I'm becoming increasingly paranoid that Einstein is still alive.  
They pulled this shit once before for a staged 'intervention', everyone sitting in a circle in the living room clutching pillows  
while my oldest sister Danielle read from the Twelve Steps and my mom cried in a corner chair.  
'You're out of control,' my dad said,  
which prompted a mini tantrum as I made a big deal out of stuffing toothpaste into my backpack.  
' _I'm under my own control_!'

'Since when is Leah vegan?' I want to know.  
She glares at me from across the table, but I'm still feeling warm and fuzzy from the last shot I took in the bedroom,  
sipping Pepsi through a straw to wash down the bite of pizza that feels like lead on my tongue.  
'Since forever. Haven't you seen Cowspiracy?'  
'Yeah, so?'  
'So, how could you still eat animal products now that you know about the effect the agricultural industry has on the environment?'  
I can see the greasy fake vegan cheese lumped up in her sleeve.  
My paranoia intensifies. I'm now like 87% sure that the door was left half-closed to inhibit my making a quick exit.  
I'm like, 'Because I don't give a fuck about the environment. You really think you eating shitty overpriced fake pizza is gonna save us all from _The Day After Tomorrow_?'  
'It's worth trying.'  
'Zechariah, sweetheart, why don't you eat something? You look pale.'  
I tell my mom I'm 'really digging this Pepsi right now' while she exchanges one of Those Looks with my dad.

Matty finally bursts, 'I told you not to get the sausage. You wasted your money. Look at him, he's high as a kite.'  
I wave my fork vaguely in his direction in a way that I think looks completely put together. 'What is this, Seventh Heaven? No one says 'high as a kite' anymore.'  
'He was digging around in those sharps containers in the Whole Foods bathroom,' he says.  
I shove my plate back and take a big gulp of Pepsi, which burns my throat going down and results in a loud burp.  
'You're full of shit, dude, I was taking a dump.'  
' _That's where I found him_.'  
'Please, guys,' my mom sounds strained, 'can we just get through dinner?'  
(I'm now 102% sure this is a cover for an impending Inquisition.)  
I nod and pour out another Pepsi. 'Leah can't get through dinner.'  
This is said under my breath.  
Danielle gives me a look.

She wants to know what I was doing in the Whole Foods bathroom and 'where have you been staying lately?'  
I tell her I've been 'sleeping under a bridge. I'm charging tolls now.'  
This is too much for Matty, the straw that breaks the proverbial asshole's back. He reaches across the table to push my plate back in front of me,  
'Would you cut the poor tortured soul act? You're not Kurt fucking Cobain, Zechariah, you have a college fund. You don't just sit there and take out all your shit on _mom and dad and Leah_ just because you ended up drowning in your own mediocrity.'  
I get the feeling I'm being quoted to, a private insight on a speech Matty's been practising  
in front of his bathroom mirror for months or even years.

'I am a mediocrity, dude,' I say. 'I'm mediocrity's patron saint.'  
'You're a mess. You can barely string two words together, and I saw you going through the drawers in the guest room.'  
'That's enough,' my dad says, but I can hear the word 'Intervention' in the back of his throat,  
and my mom is standing up, an ominous sign  
(to dig out the Twelve Steps again, I'm thinking wildly).  
I knock back the rest of my soda and jump to my feet and say loudly, 'I'm not sticking around for this. You're all hypocrites. So I'm a poor tortured soul? So _what_. If I have a college fund, how come no one ever gives me any money? How come everybody else gets to access their account while I have to beg for scraps at the kiddy table? I'm a generous guy! I could be Jesus with Donald Trump's black Amex, meanwhile Matty spends every cent he gets on stacks of blow and Leah keeps a stash of dingdongs in the toilet paper rolls in her dorm, and at least I know I'm fucked up - '  
I grab a box of pizza, shove a cigarette into my mouth and slam my way to the door before anyone else can stand up;  
my mom makes a strangled sound and grabs for Matty, who is still trying to talk over me as I reach the door  
and I'm yelling ' _And I'm not even that high_!'

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The graffiti really exists in a Whole Foods bathroom in Portland, Oregon (or maybe Seattle, WA). It just seemed too perf and Grantaire and was the inspiration for a lot of this chapter.
> 
> The next chapters will be back to canon characters.
> 
> The mediocrities line that Grantaire rips is from Amadeus.


	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm so bad. I'm terrible. I update so sporadically. If you're still here, which of course I hope you are, thank you?! 
> 
> Disclaimer: Please don't do hard drugs. They're super bad for you.

Bossuet is sick of having me on his couch

like a permanent stain w/ the unwashed clothes & greasy hair & the endless watch list of

our fave movies playing in the background.

'We had that agreement about showers.'

'Dude, _what is your fucking damage_ about the shower thing?'

This is said while pulling the flat tail end of a beer through the lip of the can.

' _My damage_ is that you smell like carrion.'

I tune out at this point and go back to watching Tom Hanks hug his volleyball

vaguely aware of Bossuet at my side with the weed smell and a bottle of shampoo he's

trying to convince me to use

that I almost drink from

(this is totally by mistake).

 

Not by mistake, I drank shampoo once in kiddie jail out of desperation.

The taste like chemical salt in my throat

and I gagged up bubbles but got it down because

I was pretty sure it would do 'something' to me in lieu of drugs/alcohol/cigarettes/weed.

Something turned out to be a raging case of the runs & puking up foam all night,

gauging which way was safest to face the toilet while I yelled out to the YDA on duty

about _listeria_ on food that sits around in the open for too long

(& which he believed, to spare the night shift an emergency trip to the hospital).

 

I fall asleep with my head on Bossuet's shoulder sometime in between

_Ferris Bueller's Day Off >and _the Exorcist.__

Getting that shaky chilly sweaty feeling that precludes a bad hangover

like my skin is cold rubber stretched over the bone,

spongy and sick & I dream about Commie Adonis splayed out on Prouvaire's bed.

We're spooning and speaking in non sequiturs

'You never help me with my English essays.'

'I used to wish I was a dog as a kid.'

'Are you good at math?'

Holding hands in the back seat while Montparnasse fixes his eyebrows in the rearview

mirror

I realise suddenly that we're on our way to a funeral & it makes me sad

my mom dressed all in black

thinking something about fences and elephants & Matty pulls the lit cigarette out of my mouth

' _Do you like to suck big dicks_?'

 

'What?'

'I said, 'that's the best line in this movie'.'

'What?'

' _Do you like to suck big dicks_ ,' Bossuet says. He nudges me, 'I'm pretty serious

about the shower thing, but if you go now instead of later you can sleep on the other end of my bed.'

' _Do you_ like to suck big dicks?'

'Go,' says Bossuet.

(I take the shower & fall asleep with his foot in my face.)

 

Next morning he decides we both 'need to get out more' and hinges my access to his

weed stash on participation in the class field trip

Aka getting his dweeby friend Marius laid.

 

This is to be achieved in a tacky karaoke club downtown that Bahorel 'loves'.

(Normally I would be 150% down, but I am a) hungover and b) Marius.

'Marius is my friend,' Bossuet says for like the fifteenth time on the cab ride over to pick up The Lad and Bossuet's other commie friend from their commune in Harlem.

'What are you, in high school?' I say.

My nose is stuffy from the sickness & the never going outside & raging allergies to all things decent, so I sound lame.

'Get a job.'

'I get it, bro.'

'Marius doesn't have anyone else,' Bossuet says.

'Please. He has an entire compound of college radicals ready to take him under their wing, garanimals and all.'

'He has no family.'

'Neither do you, you still turned out cool.'

'And he's really bummed out right now.'

'Oh man, they cancelled _Bear in the Big Blue House_?'

'What do you have against Marius? You don't even really know him.'

 

Note: I don't actually have anything 'against' Marius,

so much as I can see that he's Too Innocent For This World & that makes me aggressive

not at him

but there are continents worth of people on this watery hellhole of a planet who believe

in the douchebag social Darwinist logic

'survival of the fittest'

freely interpreting Hobbes to mean they can practise their own fucked up form of anarchy

take and take and take and take

and give nothing back if you can't come and get it back yourself.

It's survival of the shittiest, and it easily negates any good thing we had going for us as a species.

Marius is like the field mouse to their eagle,

naive and sweet Sesame Street Stalker, the kind of guy who falls in love with a girl he's never met before because he saw her sitting on a park bench reading prayer books with her grandpa;

scurrying out into open fields because he was feeling romantic about the moonlight

& they would catch and crush him _exactly because they could_.

 

I have a headache just thinking about it.

It's a good ten hours too early for me to be putting effort into any kind of political thinking.

I hum along to the radio and watch the window go up and down for a sec until it makes me dizzy,

'Marius is a lover, not a fighter.'

'So are you,' Bossuet says.

'I'm an alcoholic, dude, it's different. I've completely bowed out of the ring.'

'Yeah, well.'

 

Marius is a romantic.

Note lower case r. (As opposed to my own grand R, sole product of two years failed

French classes at the Dwight School,

the only sad fuckers willing to put up with me for a hefty fee,

commonly known to others in the NYC private school

world as 'Dumb White Idiots Getting High Together'.)

Marius is all the googly starry eyes of every star-crossed lover ever written about,

Leo DiCaprio's Romeo meets Jack on an iceberg and has a baby with that one wimpy guy character that survives every horror movie

to go back home to his girl.

Deep conversations held exclusively in eye contact and gentle sighs.

He'll probably find this church hymns chick in a confessional and have five fat happy starry-eyed kids.

Heaven on Earth.

Can you really hold it against him?

'Dude,' I say, 'we have to pull over, I'm gonna puke.'

 

' _Now_?'

'I'm hungover. You wouldn't let me do breakfast shots.'

'Open the door when we hit this light here.'

'I'm gonna puke _in this car_.'

'Not if you can still talk, you're not.'

 

I make it to the light, mumbling about the hair of the dog and alopecia being a symptom of Bossuet's overcontrolling personality.

'I'm gonna lose a star on my Uber account now,' he says sadly.

'Psych. You didn't have any to begin with.'

I spit out the window and wipe my mouth with my shirt sleeve.

'I'm never gonna be able to get a cab now thanks to you,' says Bossuet. 'They don't even respond to your requests once you go under like, 4.2'

'I'll buy you a bike.'

'You can't even buy yourself breakfast, you can't buy me a bike, and now you compromised my Uber account.'

'Look at the bright side, dude. It's mad impressive that you hadn't compromised it yet on your own.'

'I'll compromise you in a minute.'

'Sounds sexy.'

 

We go on like this until the car groans to a halt in front of a youth hostel on 127th.

Marius and a curly-haired chick I sort of recognise from Commie AA wait out front like the utter walnuts they are

friendly & waving & not even squinting against the sunlight that is unacceptably bright for 7 pm.

Marius climbs into the middle of the back seat between me and Bossuet.

He smells like milk and admits in a sheepish voice right off the bat that he's 'never done karaoke before'.

 

I send the window up and down again.

'It's cool, buddy, we'll get you all hopped up on a little crystal and you'll be singing way more than karaoke.'

'Don't listen to Grantaire,' says Bossuet. 'He's a brat and a bad influence.'

'I told you,' the curly-haired chick gives me a long look in the rear view mirror, 'we're pre-gaming. This is important for your education.'

'Who's Little Crystal?' Marius asks.

Bossuet: 'I'm gonna leave that one for you to explain.'

I sink down lower in my seat, pull the sunglasses from my forehead to cover my eyes &

embrace the jackhammer in my skull like an old friend.

 

We hit traffic.

Thirty minutes of Courfeyrac (why do all the people I end up intimately acquainted with sound like their ancestors coughed on their immigration papers when asked for surnames?) grilling Marius on his 'ideal chick',

a laundry list of Disney-worthy attributes that would be cute if we were all five years old and taking the carpool to a Valentine's Day dance.

Because we are teetering dangerously close to a 4.2 and the end of Bossuet's brief

flirtation with Uber,

I cannot

smoke.

This, of course, sucks & I, of course

make that super known.

 

'Why did I bring you? Why did I think that was a good idea?'

'I don't know, dude. I warned you.'

'You both need to chill out,' says Courfeyrac via the mirror. 'This is about Marius and - '

'Ursula,' Marius whispers.

'Wait - that evil octopus fucker?'

'Nobody fucks octopuses in _the Little Mermaid_ , Grantaire, for fuck's sake, it's a Disney movie.'

'It's octopi.'

'Who gives a fuck what it is, dude, bro,' I put my hand on Marius's knee, tap it gently,

'your chick is named after a villainous sea thing and reads prayer books in _public_ for _fun_. The Russians are coming, bro - red flag, red flag, red flag. You need, like, an intervention.'

'This is why we're going out,' says Courfeyrac.

'I'm going to find her.' says Marius.

My temple throbs.

I want to die.

**Author's Note:**

> Idk if anything stood out to you as blaringly ooc or unrealistic, do let me know. On the other hand, if you really really liked it, do let know.


End file.
